Client
- Microsoft — Office 365
Date
- 2018 - 2019
Roles + Responsibilities
- Design Vision
- User Research + Testing
- High-Fidelity Mocks
- Rapid Prototyping
- Engineering Support
What is M365 admin?
The Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Support Assistant are designed to provide management and support for the Microsoft’s flagship cloud productivity suite including applications like Word Online, PowerPoint Online and other cloud services such as Exchange Online hosted email for business, cloud storage with OneDrive and Microsoft Teams. The Office 365 admin center can be used to set up organizations in the cloud, add users, manage domains, licenses, view reports and open and manage support tickets.
As part of the Office 365 Admin team my role was to collaborate with PM, design and engineering on developing concepts for personalization, virtual support and workflows and UX for various components inside the Office 365 Admin experience.
Design Challenge
Challenge #1 | How do we give IT Admins greater control and insights into their organizations and make it easier for them to manage their Office environment, employees and policies?
Challenge #2 | How do we allow IT Admins to easily personalize their admin environment to better support their admin workflows?
Challenge #3 | How do we increase SMB and Enterprise customer satisfaction by providing more effective support tools that they can use from anywhere?
Designing the solution
Designing an elegant solution was a multi-team, multi-department initiative — the collective effort of design, research, PM and engineering all working together to bring the needs and challenges of our customers to the forefront of the solution.
This meant constant listening, gathering and analyzing signals, research and audits from our own products as well as those of our competitors and using all this information to design experiences that we believed would satisfy the needs and meet the challenges of our customers.
This effort took constant and continual rounds of iteration, engineering, testing and re-evaluation. We held workshops, we collected internal and external feedback, and then we’d go back to the start and work to make the experience even better.
Results
The personalization and support enhancements to the Admin Center were well received by IT Professionals, generating positive results and a more efficient support experience for users, all while helping to drive support costs down for Microsoft.
With over-the-phone support being extremely costly and causing a great deal of customer frustration, the introduction of self-diagnosis tools such as the virtual assistant and improved in-app access to resources at support.office.com resulted in a 26% increase in deflection while increasing overall customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Deflection rate
REDUCTION IN SUPPORT TICKETS
Take a walk in their shoes