Internal Agent Sales Script

Creating a better sales experience for both our internal and external users.

Design Research, Product Definition, User Flows, Wire Frames, and Visual Design

 

Overview

For our 2018 Sales script, a pivotal part of the eHealth Medicare experience (80% of our enrollments are through our agents) the user base had a huge shift from prior years. The focus was less on "expert agents" and more for our Vendor Agents who did not have the luxury of years of experience selling Medicare.

 

Role

I led the design effort on this project, liaising with the rest of my team (developers and a PM), Product Leadership, and Sales Operations.

I facilitated and designed the workshops, created the wireframes, partnered with product to gather feedback and make changes, led user testing, and created the final design deliverables.

 

The Problem

With the increase in our workforce, we needed our product to be more agent focused and intuitive so agents of all experience levels could follow our sales process and help our Customers find a plan that fits their needs.

 

The Process

Step 1: ALign the Stakeholders & Define the flow

The project was kicked off with a 2 day meeting in one of our Sales Centers with representatives from Sales, Product Management, Engineering, and Design. 

Here we worked collaboratively to understand:

  • The current process and flow,

  • How our top agents were actually selling

  • Our hypothesis of the things that we needed to improve (KPIs) and what the flow would be.

Agent flows documented post session

 

Step 2: Initial wireframes/Prototype

After determining the flow and features, I partnered with my product manager to create the first round of wireframes in order to gather stakeholder feedback on UI, content, and the flow. This went through several rounds of feedback and involved several trade offs in terms of wording, flow, and other product decisions.

We established the screen goals, and what agents needed to accomplish on those pages.

Screen Goals:

Screen Pop - Greet & Identify who the caller is, launch the script
Intro & ID - Collect basic information from the Customer in order to continue the call.
Scope of Appointment - Obtain Customer permission to talk about different types of coverage (this is required by CMS).
Eligibility- Determine if customer is eligible to enroll in a plan.
Discovery - Understand the Customer’s current situation, if they have coverage and what type.
Needs Analysis - Determine what drugs the customer takes, what doctors they visit, and other important needs that influence plan selection.
Plan recommendation - Sell the plan to the customer. Agents explain why they chose the plan they did, present the plan and why it could be a good fit for the customer.
PPE & Disclosures - Review all information required to complete an enrollment, conduct an enrollment either via phone or through a hybrid method online.

 

Step 3: User Testing

After a couple rounds of feedback, we had more questions than answers and needed a way to uncover what would make the most sense to agents. That led us to decide to do a round of user testing to focus our efforts, and prevent further changes while the product was in development.

User testing was conducted remotely via Webex with the Product Manager posing as a customer and walking through the script as if the agent was on an actual call. We sourced agents from different sites and experience levels making sure to capture the opinions of Vendor, New, and Experienced Agents.

Goals: 

  • See if the Script interface is intuitive and easy to navigate

  • Understand if Sales Agents have all the information to complete their tasks

  • Get feedback from Sales Agents on design, identify any stumbling blocks.

Feedback:

Vendor Agents
Outside call center agents tended to read the script, although still defaulted to some of what was defined previously

  • They were very thrown off by the change in flow

  • Stumbled on overly wordy sections

  • Missed launching tools, were unable to course correct

  • Liked that it gave a little more detail in needs analysis question vs having to think of other questions

  • Got stuck on more complicated pages

  • Were often confused by prompts of screen

Experienced Agents
Experienced agents tended to not read the script
(they were going off of the old script which they had memorized)

  • Were very thrown off by the change in flow

"Discovery page, process is process, screens currently have cues, threw me off when everything is different" (User 3)

  • They would launch the quote screen early and skip a proper needs analysis of the customer’s situation

  • Noted that the script was too “wordy”

"So far it looks good, looks like there’s some great tools, big fan of extra tools, just needs to get more familiar with it"

New Agents
New agents tended to read the script verbatim

  • Got stuck on sections with a lot of text

  • Missed launching tools, were unaware they didn’t launch the tools and impact on the experience

  • Thought that in some places it was hard to find right tool/verbiage

  • Felt like a lot of things were repetitive

It seems like we repeat things five time, two verbatims, and then read the same thing again, we don’t have to say this every single time, make the flow go better, make it more presentable and easier from a consumer standpoint

 

STEp 4: Revisions & Launch

After watching hours of User Testing, we met again with the project Stakeholder to discuss findings and figure out how to fix the problem areas we identified. Revisions were made according to agent feedback and balanced with business objectives and development capabilities.

The focus was on making sure:

  1. The flow was smooth and natural.

  2. Agents didn't get stuck at any particular page.

  3. Decreasing the verboseness of the previous version, a common issue identified by all levels of agents.

 

Outcomes

We launched the script redesign to production on schedule for agent training (June 12)

We managed to onboard new agents and utilize vendor agents, who were able to successfully sell Medicare plans

Our sales goals exceeded market expectations (2018)

I decided to do more user research to continue to learn about and tailor this product to our users, through regular user testing and annual agent surveys.

Since 2018 we’ve seen an increase of agent satisfaction with their tools and increased productivity and time savings.