Streamlining appointments for efficiency
Webex Assist is a web-based video consultation platform facilitating end users to seamlessly join sessions with agents through a simple browser link. The following case study delves into the incremental enhancements made to appointment management, which initially involved smaller tweaks but evolved to deliver a more substantial impact.
Problem Areas
With rising appointments across our video applications. We started to see few issues which to some extend reduced the overall experience of the call journey such as
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Agents due to network issues couldn’t end the call. This led to the call running for a longer period.
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Also, due to the above reason, we saw a lot of billing issues with the clients that were not in sync with the original video minutes usage
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No expectation of how long a video appointment should run and hence the customers' experience also suffers.
Goals
Improved Communication
With the thoughtout solution, we expect end users to be more aware of their consultation duration.
Reduce ambiguity among Agents
Agents should be allowed to decide the length of consultation and take actions based on that.
Plan for Appointment Billing
The appointment video minutes that were billed to clients need to have actual usage.
Allow Personalisation
Every appointment has different time requirements and the solution needs to be flexible to take that into account.
Controlling the way appointment is managed
To address the goal, we approached to manage our appointment scheduler better. Below is a flow diagram that explains how the call flow handling can effectively reduce such scenarios.
Appointment settings to monitor usage patterns
We introduced 'Appointment settings' that would regulate the way the appointments would function.
1
Appointment Duration
This feature will allow admins to set up a default duration and a maximum time limit for the appointment for their organisation.
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Thereby, when agent schedules an appointment, the default time will be shown on the appointment details. Alongside, the max duration setup by the admin will be applied and therby the call will automatically end post that.
2
Autoclose
This feature will allow admins to set up a autoclose time for the appointment ranging from 30mins to 24 hrs.
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This will ensure that in case any appointment is abruptly ended due to technical glictches or network failure. The appointment autoclose that is added will take into action and mark the call as ended.
3
Call Extension
This feature will allow admins to set up an autoclose time for the appointment ranging from 30 minutes to 24 hrs.
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This will ensure that in case any appointment is abruptly ended due to technical glitches or network failure. The appointment autoclose that is added will be taken into action and mark the call as ended.
Key Takeaways
Alongside, we also added UI elements that would allow users to ‘extend call’. All the emails that were sent to the end user would reflect the appointment duration time
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1. Billing of clients was more transparent.
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2. End-user and the host were aware of how long the appointment would last as we also showed the running timer.
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3. The host had more confidence in the expectations from the calls and thereby saw less escalation.