What's the current support experience like?
IBM Cloud users across all account types struggle to receive the support they need in order to be successful in their everyday roles. Sadly, it is not an uncommon story to hear about the phantom support case that received no response for months at end, leaving users in frustration at the profound quiet.
The current relation with our users can be related to the notably-digital trend of “ghosting” 👻 in which users are lured with fascinating concepts and yet curiosities and cries for assistance fall flat with agonizing silence. Needless to say, this lack of attention leads to a dire state of a rather strained relationship in which our users are understandably considering an escape plan to eject from this dismal experience.
Unbeknownst to our beloved users are the frenzied activities that are happening behind the scenes. Overwhelmed support engineers are faced with hundreds of unanswered support cases with the daily expectation that they’ll continue to grow. There are only so many hours, minutes, and seconds in the day that can be utilized.
Gather previous research and revalidate
Because of the extensive history our design colleagues have had with the IBM Cloud Support team since 2016, we revisited previous assets including Usabilla feedback and Medallia data to see what had changed.
- + Addition of a chatbot scoped to address billing and account-related issues
- + Consolidated IaaS and PaaS teams to support a unified IBM Cloud experience
- + FAQ library
- - No unauthenticated support experience
- - Overwhelming amount of email notifications (that eventually register as spam)
Evaluating based on usability heuristics
In order to define a baseline understanding of the state of the IBM Cloud Support ecosystem, our squad denoted existing bugs of the existing production state of 10 different use case scenarios. Moreover, we included notes highlighting improvements based on Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design.
