Overview

The Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) department at University of Phoenix evaluated students’ professional training and/or essays on approved topics for college-level credit equivalencies. Students generally needed to provide more documentation to confirm course completion before the team could evaluate and award credit.

Role + Impact

I developed processes to decrease customer (student) complaints, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce processing time. I accomplished this by:

Conducting Research
Envisioning an Empathy Map
Creating Personas
Depicting a User Journey
Ideating and Iterating on Solutions

Problem Statement

Design a customer experience that:

Helps customers feel confident in the process

Better aligns with customer expectations

Runs more smoothly and quickly from start to finish

Not doing so would mean continually dealing with frustrated customers, losing customers, and struggling to meet company productivity quotas.

After seeing that most customers were unhappy with the process, I began researching to identify the correct problem before ideating solutions.

Research

Research Methods

Interviews

Get Customer and Support Staff input

REQUIREMENTS / CONSTRAINTS

Know policies & laws

FIELD STUDY

Work with customers directly

COMPETITIVE TESTING

Learn about users’ options

I synthesized the diverse perspectives I had gathered into an empathy map to identify emerging patterns.

Empathy Map

Aggregated Empathy Map

User Pain Points

After synthesizing my research, I found that the main user pain points and trends were:

Confusing requirements

Insufficient communication

Unrealistic expectations

Lengthy process

Using this valuable information, I crafted a persona to represent those customers we serviced to bring them to life.

Persona

Main Persona

User Wants

Step-by-step process

Cheaper credit alternative

Less hassle for busy adults

Quick turnaround timeframe

A credit award guarantee

By defining the user’s wants and needs, I could more easily form the problem statement, hypothesis statement, user story, and more before representing the user’s journey.

User Journey

User Journey Map

Key Takeaways

Users voiced the following areas of improvement throughout their journey to obtain credits:

Better inform customers of process before submission

Share document requirement examples

After submission, walk through the process

Check in with customers throughout timeline

Only request docs on courses that yield credit

Creating empathy maps, personas, and user journeys, among other deliverables, helped me and stakeholders gain deeper insights into customers. This enabled us to devise better solutions.

ADDRESSING PAIN POINTS

Pain Point #1: Confusing Requirements

Customer Complaints

Why is more info needed now?

I don’t know who to contact.

I can’t get that within 20 days!

Why can’t PLA get that info for me?

What happens if I get credits?

Tracking user complaints, I found I received many of the same complaints over and over.

Solution

After understanding legalities for collecting others’ personal information, I updated email template verbiage to more clearly communicate expectations.

Result

50%
Less time composing emails

Templates reduced email response time from an average of 30 minutes to around 12 minutes, more than a 50% reduction in time.

25%
Decrease in unhappy responses

Prior to updated verbiage, an average of 7 out of 10 responses received were negative. After updated verbiage, 4-5 responses were negative.

Pain Point #2: Insufficient Communication

A chart showing where complaints occur in the PLA process and whether the complaints were addressed

I tracked the points at which complaints arose during the process and took note of times complaints were not addressed through assigned touchpoints.

Solution

Using this data, I found the optimal check-in timeframes for customers so I could reach out to them before complaints arose. I also enhanced my automated tracker to provide reminders on those dates.

Result

30%
Increase in customer response

Customers previously only responded when they had complaints. Adding more frequent check-ins increased customer responses by 3 for every 10, on average.

100%
Customers were contacted

Before, it was difficult to keep track of customers. With the tracker, it was easy to tell when to contact them, thus all customers could be contacted on time.

Pain Point #3: Lengthy Process

A chart depicting the PLA submission and evaluation process and where bottlenecks occur

I laid out the submission process and identified bottlenecks. Upon reviewing this, I discovered that these lengthy areas were within our control, meaning we could improve.

Solution

I suggested updates to clarify unclear policies so extra time would not be spent trying to interpret the policies during an evaluation. I also created an Excel database that checked all resources at once instead of manually checking each website individually.

Result

15%
Reduction in number of errors made

My quality control scores ranged from 75-95% when policies were left open to interpretation. With more concise policies, my scores were 99-100%.

60%
Reduction in evaluation time

Evaluation time was reduced from 1-2 hours per submission to 30-40 minutes, around a 60% reduction on average.

Pain Point #4: Unrealistic Expectations

Graph depicting the process of tracing individual complaints back to their sources

Tracing complaints from customers back to their origin, I found these unrealistic expectations came from a mix of support personnel, consisting of Enrollment and Academic Counselors, and the PLA website.

Solution

I helped coordinate support personnel training on the PLA process to ease misunderstandings. As a team, we suggested updates to the PLA website and submitted revision requests individually as needed.

Result

United
cross-functional teams

After setting up training with each Enrollment and Academic Counseling team at the university, we worked more closely together.

Less
confusion from website

Adding revision requests to have the website updated as needed reduced confusion and the number of complaints received from customers.

A Final Note

Throughout my time at the university, I iterated on processes to better perfect the customer’s experience. This was not always a smooth process.

Problem

On several occasions upper management did not want to make changes to the process or implement any new initiatives.

Solution

Implementing changes on a smaller scale first and receiving positive feedback helped upper management feel enthusiastic about the changes.

Overall Results

Business Results

Reduced overall time from 4 hours to 30-40 minutes

Lowered processing from 63 to 25 days

Processed an extra 20 files + 5 projects

Increased QA scores from 75% to 99-100% range

More credits awarded overall

*Numbers are based off of average estimates over time

Customer Results

Minimized complaints

Positive survey feedback

Less confusion overall

The changes I implemented during my own evaluation process were very successful and were spread to the rest of the team. I was also asked to mentored others on my team to help them be more successful.

LEARNINGS + LESSONS

Cross-functionality

Cross-team work improves solutions and perspectives

Be Flexible

Make sure ideas fit both customers & stakeholders

Times Change

Iterate to change in tandem with evolving requirements