Challenge
Our client, a government agency's inbox team told us they feel resource-constrained when replying to users' emails. Over the course of three months, our team conducted contextual inquiry, analyzed the qualitative data, and provided our recommendations. As the first stone for future improvement, these suggestions allow the inbox team to reduce the constraints of email responses as well as achieve its mission to best serve the users. How can the inbox team solve users questions as best as they can while also reducing the time spent on the email responses?
Findings
Our clients answer various kinds of questions such as policy, training, software installing and professional questions about the formula of the model they develop. Some of these questions require the users to provide additional information. For example, if the question is a professional question, the user should better attach the reference of a certain perspective. Or else, if the question if about software installing, providing the log files the user is using would be really helpful for the team to understand the question. However, in most of the circumstance, users don’t provide enough information. Thus, team members need to write follow-up emails to ask the users to specify the question or provide attached files.
Recommendations
Our recommendation is to provide a form for users to write emails. After clicking on the “CONTACT US” on the landing screen, users would be led to the page of a form. The form plays the role of a guidance and template for users to formulate an email. It asks users to provide information about their email subjects, organizations, type of questions and additional information depending on the type of the question. This hopefully reduce the ambiguous emails and make it easier for the team to assign the email to different team members.