A customer service rep juggling four open screens just to apply a discount doesn’t file a bug report. They just get slower, then frustrated, then quietly stop caring whether the customer’s problem actually gets solved. A top-three U.S. cable and telecommunications provider had been living with that reality inside its CSR sales tool for years, and everyone already knew it was broken. Knowing wasn’t the problem. Nobody had turned that knowledge into a business case anyone was willing to fund.
ROLE
Research Lead, CSR sales tool experience
TIMELINE
7-week discovery phase
TEAM
3 business analysts, 2 technologists
STAKEHOLDERS
Executive sponsors, CSR frontline staff, business analysts, technology team
TOOLS / SYSTEMS
Surveys, workshops, customer journey mapping, heuristic evaluation framework, affinity clustering, requirements traceability matrix
CONSTRAINTS
Pain points were already well known internally but had never been paired with a rigorous synthesis method strong enough to unlock funding; needed to process a large qualitative volume without losing traceability back to business value
Pairing Anecdote With Structure
Everyone with a headset already knew the CSR sales tool was slow and confusing. That wasn’t news, and it wasn’t going to move a budget on its own. I ran broad surveys and workshops to get the volume of qualitative pain points on record, mapped them against the actual customer journey stages where they occurred, then applied a heuristic evaluation framework and affinity clustering to filter that volume into a short list of high-friction themes I could actually defend. The real work came next. I traced each theme through to a formal requirement, giving every qualitative complaint a defensible line of sight to a business objective. A rep saying it’s confusing is an opinion. Twenty reps saying it independently, clustered into a theme that accounts for over a quarter of all documented friction, is a business case.
“We can reduce the number of clicks or pages to run through to make that transaction happen faster.”
Customer Service Representative
(@ global communication company)
118 rows traced. Three carried forward. The rest, an open ledger.
What I can point to: the requirements traceability matrix is a real artifact, built specifically so the qualitative-to-requirement pairing could survive contact with engineering and product planning, not just live in a sales deck. It carried all 118 requirements through a REQ-ID, a source flow (new or existing customer), and a tagged business objective, with three carried forward into the implementation phase that followed. It wasn’t a finished backlog when discovery closed. It was the handoff mechanism, and I don’t claim otherwise. Prioritization and verification were the next team’s work, not mine. The funding decision itself belongs to the executives who approved it; I can’t claim I made that call. What I can defend is that the case I built is the one they approved, and that the discovery phase closed into a nine-month engagement to implement the changes it surfaced.
Interested in turning documented customer frustration into a funded engagement?
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