Understanding Call Experiences
In-context user research to inform the documentation of current state analysis, generate future state business requirements and a project vision, and provide a clear definition of the business issues needing to be solved.
The Marriott Merlin Redesign project is a favorite here at Matter. It is one of those rare projects that uses all of our skills and expertise across research, strategy, and design at an enterprise level in support of large scale business goals.
In a nutshell, Matter spent nearly two years to redesign the reservation experience for hotel customers and reservations agents, starting with an intensive research phase to understand the current state experience, moving to a conceptual phase to model a future experience, and finally moving to a design phase to blueprint the details of a new reservation system user interface that would support the experience. As part of the business case development for the program, Matter identified tens of millions of dollars in resulting return on investment for our design work, and in doing so, validated the idea that a great solution design for users and business is best informed by the wants, needs, and requirements of users far in advance of any “solution” being devised.
This case discusses the first phase of the project, a four-month research and analysis phase.
In 2005, Marriott initiated a project to migrate the application platform on which Merlin, the primary reservation system used in Marriott contact centers, was built (from client-server to web). As part of this initiative, the sales business unit wanted to take the opportunity to evaluate the relationship between guests and reservations specialists, current contact center business processes, and supporting functionality within the reservation application, with an ultimate goal of redesigning the application user interface. Additionally, the company was moving to a formal Rational™-based requirements management framework, and needed to expand and adapt that framework to user-centered design specifications and techniques.
Because of Matter’s deep involvement and expertise with hotel guests, and their understanding of the enterprise content/data and technology systems, not to mention our understanding of the requirements management system, Matter executed a wide-ranging research project. This research examined the various user groups of the reservation application, their unique needs for the future system, current limitations of the existing system, and desired improvements for the business, application, and relationship between guests and reservations agents.
Key research goals that were met included the exploration of moving contact center interactions away from a transactional model to one that was more conversational, identifying key components of an interaction and determine where and how much “conversation” is appropriate and desired by both specialists and guests, examination and inclusion of both current and new user groups, understanding the realities and demands of guest and system interactions to inform the new application design, including a sample of future users of the system to understand their current work- flows and potential impacts of the introduction of the new system, and analyzing and interpreting data to produce a user-driven feature list to be prioritized and enacted in future development
A variety of techniques were used to gather different forms of data at several key client customer care centers and hotel properties, as well as in-home sessions with a range of hotel loyalty program members and guests. We shadowed participants through their normal routines over the course of a half or full day to see real activities as they occur in a natural environment. We reviewed previously recorded videotape with participants to explore in-depth why’s, how’s, and what’s of particular interactions which provided another level of depth beyond shadowing. We interviewed participants about issues important to the project and often incorporate exercises such as tours, card sorts, mappings, and inventories. And we performed a heuristic evaluation of the current reservation application to derive a critical evaluation of the usability and learnability of an interface design, plus accomplished a competitive assessment of like applications. We wound up with 196 hours of videotape and reams of notes.
Once data collection was complete, Matter accomplished a deep dive analysis of the research to create an experience model or framework describing the current state experience, detailing the future state model, and listing all features/requirements of the new system. The Matter analysis process examined the overall situation or context of the hotel customer care or reservations voice channel, specifically the process of handling calls between hotel guests and reservations agents. This examination led to the development of a process model illustrating the basic process of a normal call and the flaws associated with the process.
We then designed a future state process model, introducing time and steps to allow a desirable pace and a natural, comfortable flow of the call. This future state process model demarcated both conversational and transactional elements and ensured the best of both approaches were maintained. Additionally, by simplifying the entire process, a conceptual model of an interaction pattern emerged—the call pattern. The call pattern was useful because it was applicable to all current calls and could be easily applied to future call types as they arose. In fact, the basic pattern could be extended and used in all guest touchpoints or channels, thereby establishing the baseline for consistent guest service across all customer touchpoints and channels.
In addition to understanding the context of the voice channel and identifying opportunities for improving guest and agent experience, the other goal of the research phase was to develop a detailed set of new features for both the overall program (business process, training, incentives) and the application user interface. In total, the research produced 721 features that provide recommendations at multiple levels of detail from search to training to content. These features were detailed, documented, and incorporated into the rigorous and formalized enterprise requirements management framework utilized by the IT development group.
Finally, in anticipation for the next phase of development, Matter created a set of initial concepts to illustrate what the future reservation process might hold. These concepts were simply ideas that were inspired by the research, analysis, or team discussions and began to paint a picture of what was needed in the future to improve agent skill and efficiency while maximizing guest satisfaction.
The results of the research produced a coherent business vision for an enterprise-changing initiative, established the definitive battle cries for unifying business, technical, and creative team approaches to the design problem, and provided enormously detailed requirements for the business and IT groups to use in scoping and establishing benchmarks for their business case development. Matter won two additional phases of work for this project, a concept phase and a design phase, based upon the solid results of the research and extraordinary working relationship with the client.
“Matter was engaged to conduct research for a team of over 3000 specialists with varying levels of technical skills and personalities. In the middle of the research we decided to embrace a different methodology for requirements gathering which Matter also embraced without missing a beat. Matter immediately partnered with us by immersing themselves in our business both on the human and technical side which resulted in a deeper level of research and a flexible building block approach for the recommended solution. This group of partners made it seamless as to who was Marriott and who was Matter, we were all moving to a common goal. This team brought flexibility, professionalism, humor and a lot of insight on human behavior to our project that allowed our Senior Leadership team to make decisions. I regretted when their involvement came to an end and look forward to other initiatives we can work on together.” – Kathy Regan - Director Global Reservations Systems Development
Project Photos
