JWT Portal
Enabling JWT's customers to create and manage their support tickets
Impact
By transforming the manual support pipeline into an automated, self-service ticketing system, this design eliminates administrative bottlenecks significantly reducing operational overhead while giving B2B customers instant, real-time transparency into their maintenance lifecycle.
Client: Jakob Wassertechnik
Role: Sole UX Designer
Duration: 5 weeks (2024)
Status: Shipped
Issue
Relying on phone calls and emails to contact JWT representatives was no longer a sustainable way for customers to request maintenance, replacements, or repairs. While Jakob Wassertechnik already used an internal portal to manage backend support, we needed to bridge the gap and put a self-service ticket creation tool directly into the hands of the customers.
Goal
Our primary objective was to transition Jakob Wassertechnik's customer support from a manual, communication-heavy process into a scalable digital ecosystem.We aimed to design a frictionless, self-service ticketing portal that empowers users to log maintenance requests directly, while seamlessly feeding into the existing internal system to minimize administrative overhead.
Getting the Ball rolling.
To deeply understand the operational inefficiencies of the legacy workflow, we kicked off our discovery phase with an in-depth product workshop with JWT's CEO.Combining her insights with our user questionnaires, we were able to identify the worst issues in the process and extrapolate the key features of the web portal from there:
Fast and easy ticket creation process with option to include photos
An overview of all tickets and information on dates for repairs
Overview of water dispensers, including their location, past repairs documentation and other important details
A way to contact a JWT representative directly still
Obviously, understanding JWT's customers and their needs was vital to map out the details of these key features. With their relative novice status, our main goal was to enable them, without overwhelming them. We put special focus on keeping to a minimal set of features combined with minimal interaction pathways supported by a clear and simple visual design language.
Product Strategy.
Before diving into high-fidelity visuals, we spent significant time mapping the product strategy, as implied above.
Our goal was to ensure that every interaction pattern we built directly served the goal of meeting users who natively had very limited digital touch points where they were at, and enabling them to actually improve and streamline their work processes, thereby reducing JWT's customer service overhead.
Feature Prioritization: We intentionally limited the scope. While we coonsidered including customer chat function, our discovery data showed that 80% of support friction stemmed from manual ticket creation via phone calls and low digital literacy in users.
Operational Efficiency: To eliminate manual triage by JWT staff, the interface logic was built to seamlessly integrate into their existing internal ticketing system. We designed the client-facing form to include only the absolutely neccessary data inputs, eliminating everything that could confuse or slow down the process.
Defining Product Success KPIs: We established clear benchmarks to measure the design’s ROI post-launch. Success for this product isn’t measured by screen engagement time, but by efficiency metrics: reducing customer ticket creation time to under three minutes, and decreasing the total volume of manual support phone calls by at least 40% in the first quarter.
Key User Journeys.
The most relevant key user journey for Jakob Wassertechnik's customers was the process of creating tickets to schedule maintenance, repairs or installations. Before the Jakob Wassertechnik Kundenportal, these had to be created by contacting JWT customer service representatives. This led to a massive workload for these representatives and made the process tedious and time consuming for clients.Additionally, it was discovered that often, facility managers were in charge of multiple locations containing multiple water dispensers. Due to the high volume of dispensers, the need for a central management tool was reinforced.
Paths to Success.
To make sure the primary feature stayed front and center, we made it reachable from every page in as little as 2 clicks and at most 4 clicks, with nearly every area of the application offering a near-direct path to the ticket creation process.
Polish.
These screens were the final result the developers are working off of. Visually, they are WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliant (accessibility) and the devs have been handed a detailed documentation on things to keep in mind for an accessible implementation.
Login
Dashboard
Tickets
Create Tickets
Wasserspender
Wasserspender Detail
Takeaway.
This project reinforced the value of balancing strategic business goals with systematic design execution.
Aligning early with executive stakeholders and grounding our feature set in the CEO's operational insights allowed us to target critical business bottlenecks immediately, preventing scope creep later on.Successfully transitioning users from manual communication to a digital ecosystem came down to comprehensive service design. By ensuring the customer-facing interface was clear and easy to use particularily for users with little digital literacy, we managed to eliminate administrative triage while offering users the real-time transparency necessary to replace legacy workflows.
Involvement.
My Contribution:
Product Workshop
Product definition and strategy
Stakeholder interviews
High-fidelity prototypeCollaborators:
JWT CEO
PCG Development Team
Interested?
Let's talk.
Impressum
Quinn Alex Dier
Dorotheenstr. 31
40235 DüsseldorfTel: +491709065893
E-Mail: [email protected]