Home - Key Findings - Lessons Learned - Process - Prototype Walkthrough

Bank Call Center System Redesign

Project Description

Wachovia approached Carnegie Mellon with a proposal for a research project.  Wachovia wanted to investigate the systems used by their Personal Service Representatives (PSRs) to answer questions from customer's calling in with account questions or maintenance requests.  Starting in Spring 2003, a team of Masters students from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute was commissioned to leverage this work.  Wachovia provided the following project description for this team:

“Design,prototype and evaluate a unified portal, to help service representatives access multiple systems in the course of a single client. Students will initially work with both subject matter experts and service representatives in several lines of business to understand the scripts needed for a variety of call types and with technical experts to understand the architectures of the underlying information systems. They will then build a prototype of the “portal” that integrates current systems, and refine it through iterative testing.”

Key Achievements

  • Conducted a full contextual inquiry of the existing call center infrastructure, including the discovery of organizational, cultural, and systematic constraints.
  • Successfully implemented a completely remote user testing environment, allowing observers to see a user's interactions with the prototype and hear their voice in real-time from 500 miles away.
  • Iteratively designed and developed a functional data-driven prototype based on user requirements gained in contextual inquiry.
  • Delivered materials outlining the rationale for and benefits of the proposed system changes, and received very positive feedback from Wachovia.

Details Provided On This Web Site

Key Findings:  This page is a high-level overview of our findings from our months of research working with Wachovia's Personal Service Representatives.

Lessons Learned:  This page gives details on the high-level findings the team took away from the project.  This includes what they learned about project management, iterative design, and collaborative development.

Process:  This page is a discussion of the design and development process used by the team from initial fact-finding through prototyping and user testing.

Prototype Walkthrough:  This page gives an overview of the final prototype delivered to Wachovia.