The most mentioned & most requested feature of all time by our customer (~360 requests)
The most anticipated problem area by public voting (~100 votes on Product Board portal)
A request mentioned by nearly all customers in the user interviews that we’ve had
- Users struggle to consolidate multiple contact details like email addresses, phone numbers, and third-party usernames.
- Interactions from different channels (e.g., phone and email) are treated as separate contacts, causing redundancies.
- This leads to confusion, inefficiencies, and difficulty in managing customer relationships and conversations
- Users need a way to streamline contact management to provide a more organized and optimized experience.
- Problem discovery along with the product manager
- Lead the ideation workshops with the team
- Validation with engineering
- Low-fidelity and high-fidelity wire frames
- Prototyping all phases
- Usability testing with internal users and customers
- Hypothesis 1: Merging contact data will give admins and agents a clearer database of customers, resulting in a comprehensive view of conversations and all necessary information in one place.
- Hypothesis 2: Contact merging will reduce time spent on conversations and eliminate friction caused by manually duplicating contacts. This will help users maintain an omni-channel view of the customer profile.
- User Outcomes:
- Users will recognize customers across all channels and have a complete view of interactions.
- They’ll manage contacts more efficiently, saving time and improving customer service.
- Business outcomes:
- Less time spent on managing contacts and tracking conversations.
- A cleaner database with reduced duplication.
Example of the problem
There are two duplicate contacts of the same person, Jake Harper. Their history and conversation log is not consolidated into one and there is no way to merge them. They are treated as two separate conversations 😕 🙀
ProductBoard user requests
Simple Primary 1st Goal: Allow gents to easily merge two duplicate contacts for a cleaner and organised contact list and conversations. Moreover, with this functionality, the agent will be able to add multiple fields(like phone numbers, emails, etc) in the contact card.
Discovery workshop
Entry points
Allow for merging a contact with an email only with a contact with a phone number only and a contact with a phone number only with a contact with an email only. (technically complex to start with having multiple contact points)
Allow for merging contacts with multiple contact points enabling contacts to have multiple emails and phones.
Include social media handles and accounts
Phase 1
This prototype was user tested with our internal support team and externally with customers and then it went to production
The implemented modal will not work in the case of having multiple phone numbers, emails, and social media accounts. Having to repeat all fields twice such as “First Name”, “Phone”, etc is also taking so much space. We need an alternative.
Switched to a table with expandable cells to make the merging experience scalable for when we need to merge 2+ contacts. This allows for multiple contact points across different channels and reduces redundancies such as repeating information such as “First Name” in every card like the previous experience
Phase 2 : Multiple Contact Points
There were many trials for the toggling experience (which contact data overwrites which, and which contact point is primary), and they were validated through a round of usability testing and interviews and those were the most clear to customers
Contact Card Revamp
Revamped the Edit Contact Modal that would also allow for multiple phone numbers, emails in the same contant. Users can also edit and unmerge from here, and change the primary contact point if necessary. “Add new channel” allows for adding social accounts when needed.
In 2 months, this project resulted in consolidating over 100,000+ redundant contacts and conversations, improving data accuracy and organization across our different customers.