Research, Product Design, + Strategy

IBM Support

Transforming end-to-end support at the enterprise scale.

Role: I worked with four other designers and two product managers for this eight-week long incubator project.

Opportunity

IBM offers support across its 100+ products via various portals and channels. Due to the fragmented support experience, customers don’t view IBM as one company.

Four other designers and I were assigned this ambitious incubator project. Customers often had multiple products and would need to go through separate channels in IBM’s multi-tiered structure, causing frustration and confusion. On the support side, engineers struggled to gain enough context into a customer’s issue to resolve it effectively. We were essentially tasked with transforming support for all of IBM.

User research

We interviewed stakeholders, support engineers, and customers to gain deeper insight into the problem.

We shadowed support engineers and documented their workflow to understand their struggles. We also talked to customers with hardware, on-prem, cloud, and hybrid cloud products to identify unique needs. Three key themes emerged:

Support engineers need visibility into the client’s environment and collaboration to solve complex problems, but their tools don’t allow them to do this effectively.
The multi-tiered support structure results in information lost in translation. There’s no visibility into who is handling a customer’s issue.
Unannounced product changes and outdated knowledge bases leave everyone in the dark. Both customers and support engineers feel like they are an afterthought.

“I shouldn't know more than the person supporting me.”

— SaaS customers at PNC Bank

“When I look at one problem, I should see a bigger picture of the client.”

— Hardware support engineer

Our support engineers' software was older than I am

Outcome

We reimagined the end-to-end support experience and created a product roadmap for the solution.

Our goal was to present a vision to stakeholders that could be leveraged to prioritize future work. Through collaboration with stakeholders and testing ideas with users, we refined our concepts to create IBM Opel, a unified support platform. The customer experience emphasized self-sufficiency, transparency, and centralization while the support engineer experience focused on visibility, knowledge access, and collaboration. The vision leveraged cognitive technology we filed patents for.

Autonomous troubleshooting

To empower self-sufficiency, customers are provided the means for resolution. Relevant documentation is surfaced based on purchased products, success of solution for others, and technical understanding required.
Client profile

A client profile gives engineers the big picture of customers who open tickets so they can offer support specific to technical background, product usage, and environment type.
Collaboration

Support engineers who don’t work in the same domain can chat with and assign collaborators. Over time, the platform learns which engineers are best suited to resolve problems based on their availability and past tickets.
Transparent support

Customers have visibility into steps IBM has taken and will take to resolve their issue. They can also directly chat with engineers and rely on the platform for information regarding product health, updates, and outages.
Scheduling

To facilitate on-site support, customers can coordinate with engineers based on their availability and confirm appointments in the platform.
Knowledge archiving

Past tickets were leveraged for issues with similar symptoms and environments. When a ticket is resolved, steps to resolution are archived and surfaced so unique problems can be more easily diagnosed.

But, it wasn’t over…

After our final vision presentation, we continued our IBM journey on separate product teams until we received an invitation to IBM’s headquarters in Armonk.

We presented the vision, market research, roadmap, and success metrics to executive leadership. There was alignment that support should be foundational to the customer journey and a unified support experience was an enterprise differentiator.

If you are interested in learning more about this work, reach out, and let’s chat.