Lead Center is a product of CallRail, which is a telephony system. It allows our customers to weave in their phone system with our marketing data product. Previously, Lead Center didn't support Call Waiting despite it being a major function that users would expect from a telephone product. Here's how we as a team (UX design, UX content, and Product Manager) solved that problem.
With Lead Center being a telephone product, our customers had an expectation that it will operate as any phone would. Call Waiting is a major function of most phones in this day and age, so it was important to figure out a great solution for our customers.
We knew there were a few tricky things to think through from the start:
1. We offer a Team Inbox which means multiple agents can be in the same inbox and answering calls from the same area at the same time. How can me make it clear who is on hold, who is calling in, and which calls have been handled.
2. We offer Call Flows that handled routing calls to dfferent teams, people, and numbers. Call Waiting won't work with a few of our call flow steps, so how might we handle this configuration issue?
Offer a seamless call waiting feature with as little confusion for our customers as possible.
This included creating new UI elements within our inbox as well as adding in multiple steps of configuration within our settings page.
We also wanted to make it clear in the call flows page which flows are compatible with call waiting and which aren't. Making this clear, our users can make the best decisions for their teams and company regarding call waiting.
We started with research, learning about the ins and outs of call waiting. Understanding the inner workings of our Lead Center product and how we can make call waiting work for our product.
We also took the time to do some competitive research. We looked into how other companies were approaching this feature within a telephony product.
As we designed, we also had to take our mobile app into consideration. Our mobile team took on the design of call waiting once our designs were complete, but we were mindful of making choices that would not negatively impact the design in a mobile format and would create parity between the web and mobile apps.
When you're in the Lead Center product, the interaction you have clicked on in the left-hand panel will populate the middle panel and the call will be highlighted with a green box surrounding the interaction. Here we can see that an agent is on a call with Kevin Fadel and there's a new customer calling in, Emile Fay Iv.
When another calls comes in, they can decline the incoming call or put their current call on hold and answer the new call.
Wanting to ensure that our users knew what would happen, I opted for support copy here saying, "Answering will put the other call on hold."
I also opted to give them the power to hide this support copy. Once they've used the feature and understand how it works, they can dismiss this forever and never see it again. This saves valuable real estate and creates more breathing room in the inbox.
After selecting to swap calls, you can clearly see that Kevin is on hold and you are actively on a call with Emile.
If the user wants to return back to the original caller, Kevin, they can click the Swap Calls button and a loading state appears that's called Swapping. This provides the user with some feedback so they aren't wondering if it worked.
You've swapped back! This provides a sense of professionalism and gives users the ability to give excellent customer service, never letting a lead fall through the cracks.
My content strategy included some settings and configurations both in our settings page as well as in our call flows page. I've highlighted the content design for our settings page here, you can see it directly links to the call flows page as well.