A faster answer while the member is on the line
- Company
- Humana
- My role
- Senior Design Manager
- Dates
- May 2020 to Feb 2022
- Team
- Member advocates who answer the calls, as research and testing partners
- Platform
- DEBUT, an internal tool that brings a member's plan, eligibility and benefits into one screen for agents on live calls
- Tools
- Figma, Sketch
Process
Understand
Observed and interviewed member advocates on live calls
Define
Scoped a lean MVP around the most common calls
Explore
Prototyped in Figma and Sketch; tested with member advocates
Build
Piloted, then launched to 4,000+ agents
Measure
Shorter calls and better first-call resolution; roadmap from MVP to v2.0
The problem
Benefits agents answer coverage questions while a member waits on the phone. The information they needed was spread across several different systems and screens. Agents had to go to each one, work in it, and bring the answer back, all while keeping the conversation with the member running smoothly. Every extra minute on a call costs money, and every call that ends without an answer brings the member back.
My role
I led design for the tool from research through launch. I worked directly with the member advocates who answer the calls, observing them at work, interviewing them and testing prototypes with them in short agile cycles. I ran the pilot and helped research and write the roadmap that took the product from MVP to version 2.0.
Key decisions
Start small and ship.
Instead of designing everything at once, we built a lean MVP around the most common calls, piloted it, and learned from real calls before expanding.
Design for a person who is talking.
Agents can't study a screen mid-call, so the tool brought what they needed from those separate systems into one screen: the member's plan, subsidy and eligibility always visible on the left, benefits search with category filters in the middle, and the right phone number and resources beside each answer. Their attention could stay on the member instead of on the next system.
Let the pilot set the roadmap.
What agents ran into during the pilot shaped what went into version 2.0, rather than the original feature list.
Outcome
Launched to more than 4,000 benefits agents. Calls got shorter and more calls were resolved the first time.
What I'd do next
Watch a set of recorded calls before and after, to show exactly where the time savings came from.
Images
