Netology is the largest online university in the Russian-speaking space, specializing in training specialists in the IT field.
During my time at Netology, I focused on developing learning management systems and various internal interfaces for the platform.
Over my 3.5 years at Netology, I played a leading role in several major releases that addressed these issues and improved the platform. I have accomplished the following:
Our support teams previously used several tools to connect with our users, such as email, messengers, social media platforms, and an expensive help desk tool that was not customizable for all our needs. The use of scattered communication channels outside our platform led to confusion, delays, and poor customer satisfaction. To address these issues, our team decided to create an MVP ticket system as an experiment to improve our students' support and provide our support team with robust analytics tools. If this experiment proves successful, we plan to continue developing the ticket system further.
MVP and feedback. Our plan on this stage was to create a minimum viable product (MVP) for a ticket system and determine if we should continue developing it or switch to another third-party help desk tool. We had a few weeks and a team of developers to accomplish this.
The ticket system consisted of two interfaces: one for students and the other for the support team. To ensure we didn't miss any important details, we decided to create the student interface first. My goal was to create an effortless and seamless experience for our students. The aim was to smoothly connect them with the right support operator while unobtrusively asking them about their problem. I suggested designing an interface that resembled a chatbot simulation, so that additional questions related to the topic of the chat wouldn't feel intrusive. At the start of the conversation with the bot, the user would select one of six topics and then answer a series of questions to help direct their request to the appropriate support team. The conversation with the bot was quite realistic, and when I tested the interface with our students, they did not face any issues.
I also created a cute chatbot character that would be hard to get mad at, even if it occasionally froze :)
To create a minimum viable product (MVP) interface for the support team, I conducted user interviews with 2-3 members from each team, including technical support, sales, and learning coordinators. During the interviews, I asked detailed questions about their specific work requirements and issues. After compiling the responses, I created a list of the most important issues that my team and I decided to include in the first iteration. The first iteration consisted of a unified interface for all the operators, along with basic information about each student, such as the page they started the conversation from, courses attended, and previous conversations. Once our team completed the implementation of the MVP, we received very positive first statistics. The average answer time decreased from 1.5 days to just a few hours, and the operators were thrilled with the new interface, actively asking us to continue developing it.
Next iterations and results. During the next few iterations, I added several useful features to the ticket system. One of the most significant was the creation of a dashboard that displayed operators' performance statistics based on user feedback. This feature proved very helpful for measuring operators' workload and customer satisfaction. I also added many other interesting features to the interface, such as the ability to chat with multiple operators at once, integration with Jira, a chat feature exclusively for operators without students, mobile interfaces for the entire ticket system, and statistics on students' course performance. The entire project was completed in seven iterations (where one iteration is equivalent to one sprint) in three months. After the system was launched, the average response time of an operator to a request was reduced to less than 30 minutes within two months, greatly improving customer satisfaction.
