Escalating
UX changes

Two months into its launch, Foureyes PE+ was onboarding new users every week. The users were car dealerships who were using the AI-powered tool to reach out to thousands of sales leads in the time it would have taken to contact 100.

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But there was a problem.

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AI was sending out too many messages to people who did not want them. Dealerships who had just started using the tool began calling Foureyes Customer Success Managers (CSMs) in droves, asking to suppress the amount of messages going out.

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At launch, suppressing messages took 30 minutes per dealership. The process was frustrating and repetitive, requiring support staff to suppress the same list of people from several messaging lists.

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Every minute that they were not suppressed, messages would continue to send and car dealerships would lose more leads. Because of this, the issue was escalated and we needed to solve it ASAP.

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My goal was to clean up the process, make it simple, and easy. As a result, I got the process down to 5 minutes, reducing the workload by more than 80%.

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The Process

From start to finish, it took 1 week to release a fix. Immediately, I began investigating the issue, which involved...

• Interviewing CSMs who had first-hand experience with the issue,
• Analyzing pain points and their causes, and
• Testing the solution with CSMs so they knew what was changing and could ensure that the changes were positive.

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Step 1: Interviewing CSMs

It was easy to find the root of the issue. After talking with several CSMs, they all pointed to the same thing: the settings page was a mess.

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Before the escalation, the settings page was a dumping ground for all settings added to PE+. As more features were added, they were left unorganized and the focus of the page began to blur.
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Step 2: Analyzing Pain Points

At this point, I started a heuristic analysis of the settings page. I found 5 critical issues that were causing message suppression to take so long.

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1. ‍Suppressions are at an individualized campaign level
   CSMs must add the same suppressions for each campaign. Unless there is compelling evidence that dealers want or need this level of control, I recommend making suppressions a global setting.
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2. ‍Suppressions populate left to right, line by line
   The lack of order makes it difficult to scan and see if things are missing. The selected suppressions are not ordered alphabetically, but by when they were added.
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3. ‍Input field makes it easy to remove suppressions, but difficult to add them
   Suppressions populate the input field as pills that can be removed via the X. Suppressions are added by clicking on the field itself. Once a few suppressions are already added, there is no indication of how to add more to the list.
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4. ‍Multi-select drop down, single-select search
   The search function pulls up all matching results in the drop down, but selecting one closes the drop down and clears the search term, forcing users to type in search terms again. This is especially frustrating when several search results need to be selected.
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5. ‍Drop down limits visibility, easy to close accidentally
   The search results drop down only shows 8 results at a time. Users have to scroll to see more, making it easy to miss what they're looking for. Clicking away from the drop down makes it disappear, forcing users to start their scroll all over again.
   
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Step 3: Testing the Solution

From my investigation, it was clear that it took so long to suppress messages because the settings menu was chaotic. The options in the settings menu were disorganized, and it was too difficult to search for people to add to the exclusions list.

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My solution overhauled the settings page. I made 3 major changes:

• A modal with search and multi-item select for adding suppressions to the exclusions list replaced the clunky pills and drop down system
• The exclusion lists became a global setting, instead of being individual to campaigns
• The settings page was reorganized into tabs so that every view served a more specific purpose

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When I presented this solution to the CSM team and had them try it out, the feedback was simple:

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"Hell yeah. Ship it now." -Seth, Manager of Customer Success team

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With the CSM team's emphatic support of the new design, I worked with the Product Developers to get the new settings page live within the week.

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The results

‍The time to suppress outreach for an account went from a frustrating
‍30 minutes to only 5 minutes.

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The Customer Success team was very excited about these changes. This project proved to be a great opportunity for them to feel heard by the product team and the quick turn around meant that we eased an immediate thorn in their workflow.