Revamping Support:
A Navigation & Content Upgrade
Financial technology resellers that partner with Fiserv have access to a dedicated and tailored support portal. The purpose of this portal is to enable partners to self-serve when they have simple questions, and to promote new products and services.
However, feedback from the partners’ contacts at the company revealed that they often heard that the content was not up to date. Analytics also showed a low adoption of the support site by the partners.
How can we make it easier for partners to access the information they need while decreasing the number of calls to Fiserv team members?
Auditing the Competition
I began by looking at other companies’ support portals and websites to find out what was available, and what features and content they had that we didn’t.
Analyzing Search Behavior
Using Google Analytics, I also mapped out partner behavior to view when partners were exiting the pages, as well as what terms they were searching for most frequently within the portal. The search bar for the support portal did not lead to a search results page, so partners frequently left after not finding what they needed through the global search. I discovered that partners were often searching for similar topics, many of which were not robustly represented in the portal. To present this information to key stakeholders, I created word clouds to visualize search terms in an easily digestible way.
Going to the Users
Following this preliminary data collection, I moved on to conducting in-depth interviews with both internal Fiserv and external partner users who frequented the support site with some regularity. I heard similar feedback to what we had anticipated: the information wasn’t up to date in the portal. However, we also learned some new things: the website was difficult to navigate, and the partners wanted information tailored to their specific reseller type.
Leaving a Trail
In addition to creating a new information architecture, I had heard that partners were unsure of what topics were on each page, leading them to jump from page to page on the website, digging for information. To alleviate this pain, I proposed an accordioning navigation that would allow partner to peek into what was on each page, as well as a secondary in-page navigation to easily hop between sections.
I created a clickable prototype with these features and tested it with internal and external users to validate the designs, and then iterated upon them before delivering recommendations.
Mapping and Remapping the Site
To address the first issue that I uncovered, I mapped the existing portal’s information architecture and made each of the informational sections into a separate card for a card sort.
I then recruited Fiserv team members as well as partner users and asked them to complete a quick card sorting activity with me. As they sorted the topics into intuitive categories, I had them explain to me why they thought those topics belonged together based on their own mental models. Armed with this qualitative data, I moved on to a quantitative analysis of the card sort results.
I used R to create a tree of the card sort data; this was helpful, but needed more nuance from the qualitative data. I integrated feedback I had gotten with the tree sort and created an additional rainbow sort with the topics. From this, I designed a new information architecture for the content and top navigation of the page.
Blue Sky Ideas
Finally, I suggested that we integrate a chat bot to help direct partners to content they couldn’t find as well as enable them to resolve simple issues. I also proposed an integration of the support site with the support ticketing system available to partners in their portfolio management application, creating a more seamless experience between the two platforms.
Delivering the Goods
I presented out the results of this research to the stakeholder team, and was given the go ahead to share it with the web designers that would be reconfiguring the site. As of the time of this post, the designers are still working on finalizing the support portal as it will exist.