Optimising Agent Workflow
Integrating “Over-the-Top” Device Insurance at Vodafone

My Role

UX Designer

Team

Product Owner
Business Analyst
Propositions Lead
Solution Architect
Tech Designer

Duration

2.5 months

Company

Vodafone
Project Type : Solution design for an enterprise platform used by over 100,000 customer agents at Vodafone.
The Challenge & Opportunity: Reducing Cognitive Load for High-Stakes Interactions

The Challenge/Problem

Vodafone aimed to introduce a new, crucial insurance product for devices purchased by customers outside Vodafone stores.

The core challenge lay in seamlessly integrating this offering into an already complex and information-dense enterprise platform used by customer agents.
When a customer called an agent seeking to insure their external device, two critical questions emerged
Eligibility: How could an agent quickly and accurately determine if the device was eligible for insurance, given varying criteria?
Integration: How would this new insurance product fit into the existing six diverse end-to-end customer journeys (e.g., updating a package, upgrading, changing ownership)?
The existing agent interface was already saturated with information, leading to high cognitive load. Our key performance metric was to keep the average response time for agents under 50 seconds.

This meant agents needed to
rapidly check eligibility
understand insurance options across a customer’s multiple packages
and, confidently suggest suitable insurance plans

My Design Process: Applying Behavioural Models for Intuitive Solutions

I adopted a Design Thinking approach, fostering an iterative process crucial for navigating multiple stakeholder inputs and inherent complexities.

Research & Shared Understanding:

My design process began with qualitative research. workshops with key stakeholders (Product Owner, BA, Propositions Lead, Solution Architect, Tech Designer) were instrumental in creating initial user flows for the various customer journeys.

This collaborative mapping not only validated existing processes but also established a shared understanding of where the new insurance offering would conceptually reside within the overall customer experience.

Following this, I conducted interviews with three frontline customer agents. These interviews provided critical insights into their daily pain points, existing workflows, and how the new insurance product would impact their efficiency and cognitive strain.

Ideation & Cognitive Load Reduction (Key Decision & Rationale)

The most significant challenge during ideation was directly addressing the cognitive load on agents. Many solutions were proposed, but the complexity of integrating a new product across multiple customer journeys, diverse device types, and varied customer packages made a straightforward solution elusive.

To overcome this, I leveraged insights from behavioural models, specifically applying the B.I.A.S framework (Block-Interpret-Act-Store). This framework suggests that users tend to “Block” information overload, especially if it seems irrelevant to their immediate task. Therefore, the design needed to frame context effectively to help users “Interpret” the screen more efficiently.
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My key decision was to implement a progressive disclosure approach.

Instead of bombarding the agent with all insurance-related information upfront, I designed a solution where a dedicated “insurance eligibility” button would activate and become visible only when required within the specific customer journey.

This means agents not actively looking to add insurance would not be distracted by irrelevant information, thereby “blocking” unnecessary cognitive input.
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When the relevant agent clicked this button, only then would the eligible devices for that specific customer, along with relevant insurance options, become visible.
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This strategic use of progressive disclosure, informed by the BIAS framework, significantly reduced cognitive load by presenting information only when contextually relevant.

The third step involved meticulously analyzing all the various customer journeys to strategically embed this progressive disclosure mechanism wherever appropriate.

Collaboration

Throughout the design process, close collaboration was maintained with the development team and business stakeholders.

Workshops were held to explain design rationale and gather technical feasibility input, ensuring the proposed solutions were not only user-centred but also technically viable.

The Solution & Impact: Seamless Integration, Maintained Efficiency

The Final Solution

The implemented solution centred around an intuitive, conditionally activated button that brought up a clear display of device eligibility and insurance options.

This progressive disclosure model allowed agents to effortlessly integrate the new insurance product offering into their existing workflows across multiple distinct customer journeys, without increasing information density on their primary screens.

Key Features/Components:

A context-sensitive, conditionally visible “Check Device Insurance Eligibility” button.
A clear, concise overlay or dedicated section that appears upon activation, displaying eligible devices and relevant insurance options specific to the customer’s packages.
Seamless integration points across multiple high-volume agent journeys like “Updating a Package,” “Upgrading,” and “Change of Ownership.”

Outcomes & Metrics

The successful implementation of this solution was a significant win for Vodafone. The business successfully launched the new insurance product, achieving its goal of offering the product on devices bought outside the network.

Crucially, the design led to minimal difference in average response times for agents, effectively meeting the target metric of less than 50 seconds. This demonstrated that a new, complex offering could be integrated without compromising the efficiency of the massive agent workforce.
The main challenges included -
the inherent complexity of balancing six distinct customer journeys
the imperative to reduce cognitive load on an already information-dense screen,
and , integrating a new product into an existing, live enterprise platform used by over 100,000 agents without disrupting existing workflows.

Learnings and Takeaways

1
Leveraging Behavioural Models in UX: This project was a powerful demonstration of how applying behavioral frameworks (like BIAS) can lead to highly effective, intuitive UX solutions, particularly in reducing cognitive load in complex enterprise environments.
2
Effective Stakeholder Management: Navigating input from multiple high-level stakeholders (Product Owner, BA, Propositions Lead, Solution Architect, Tech Designer) was crucial. Efficiently gathering and synthesizing diverse research inputs was key to alignment and project success.
3
Collaboration is Key: On a project of this scale and complexity, close and continuous collaboration with both the development team and the business stakeholders was paramount. Early and consistent communication ensured that design decisions were both user-centred and technically feasible, fostering a cohesive and successful project delivery.

Thank You

Thank you for reviewing my case study. I am passionate about leveraging design to solve complex, real-world problems and would be pleased to discuss this project, or any other, in more detail.