CRM for a 6M-client bank, from discovery to execution

Company

Tinkoff is a fully online bank: no branches, so every client interaction runs through calls, chats, and the app. At the time the bank served 6M clients; today it is over 36M. Behind all that communication sits an internal CRM used by thousands of support operators.

My role

I worked as a Senior UX/UI Designer embedded within the development team, one of a team of 2 designers. The project was a completely new CRM to replace the 10-year-old Siebel-based interface: a tool for operators who take calls and messages from clients across all the bank's products and every communication between the bank and its clients.

Approach

The research was a huge chunk of the work in itself. I studied each bank department in depth, finding the most frequent user problems and compiling user journeys, and then researched the calls themselves: how support navigates Siebel during calls and chats. As the bank had run on Siebel for 10 years without UX design, the information was scattered across legacy screens. It took a lot of effort to navigate them, and on top of that came the cost of the learning curve for new employees.

Key decision

We designed the new CRM around a search line. Instead of navigating a maze of menus, the operator types what they need: a client, a procedure, a tool, and the workspace surfaces it in the flow of the conversation. This simple idea was quite revolutionary in 2017, and it was a great core for the product.

Testing

We tested the search-based concept multiple times on real calls, and operators consistently completed them faster with the new interface. The effect showed up again after rollout: learning time for new operators dropped significantly, since a search line does not have to be memorized the way a decade of legacy screens does.

The scope of the redesign

The redesign meant going through every workflow for every product: seeing it, analyzing it, and defining what can and cannot be performed in each channel. It was a massive research effort, run product by product: debit cards with their particular types of procedures, credit products with rules of their own. A large part of it happened on site, sitting with operators on real calls.

Additional projects

Two connected projects ran alongside the CRM. I was not the main designer on them, but helped on separate tasks. The first was a visual admin panel for creating procedures: a layer where the support team builds and updates the business logic of handling client requests without involving developers, so changes ship fast and simply. The second was the company's first UI kit, which later grew into a consistent visual language across the company's products.

Results

Call transfers dropped from 50% to 25%, half as many clients handed from operator to operator. Learning time for new operators fell significantly. A decade of legacy Siebel screens became one search-based workspace, built by a team of 2 designers. And the UI kit work fed into the bank's first consistent visual language, used across company products.