Role: Product Designer
Company: Two Barrels
Team: 2 engineers, 1 project manager
Deliverables: User Flow, Mockup, Prototype
A ticketing system bottlenecked by search
At Two Barrels, I was responsible for various products in CorpTools, our business management software suite. CorpTools' ticketing system managed customer communications by grouping related interactions (emails, calls, and documents) into Problems, which were handled by Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).
Problem Search, the tool for locating specific Problems, was originally limited to CSR team managers.. CSRs had no way to independently research customer history, which created inefficiencies:
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Managers were overwhelmed by requests to find old Problems for CSRs — 1 in 5 emails between managers and CSRs was related to problem search(!).
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CSRs couldn’t provide the best customer experience without historical context.
My role was to redesign Problem Search to empower CSRs, enhance manager capabilities, and maintain fairness in ticket assignment workflows.
Balancing empowerment and fairness in ticket assignment
The redesign had to address critical pain points for both admins and CSRs:
Cherry-picking
Managers worried that giving CSRs access to Problem Search would allow them to bypass the ticket queue and pick easier Problems. Resistance from managers was a common roadblock of this project.
Limited functionality
Problem Search lacked filters, making it difficult even for managers to find the right tickets.
Scalability
With the team and ticket volume growing, the search tool needed to accommodate increasing complexity, such as handling user permissions.
Redesigned search slashes manager workload by 20%
We delivered a transformed Problem Search tool that addressed these challenges while streamlining workflows:
Advanced filters for managers
Introduced filters for status, date ranges, assignee, region, and Event types, dramatically improving search precision.
Reworked permissions
Allowed CSRs to search only within Problems tied to customers they had previously handled, eliminating the risk of cherry-picking.
Optimized usability
Applied industry-standard faceted search principles, customized to our ticketing workflow, ensuring both managers and CSRs could easily find Problems.
These changes eliminated 20% of emails between CSRs and their managers, reduced response time for CSRs to a significant proportion of tickets, and resulted in positive feedback from managers who loved the filters as well as CSRs who appreciated their new autonomy.