Wayfair Bento
- Date
- 2020-2022
- Team
- Wayfair Customer Service
- Industry
- e-Commerce
- Platforms
- Web
In 2020, I had the privilege of being part of a cross-functional team tasked with creating a brand new platform for nearly 3,500 customer service agents at Wayfair who handled customer emails, phone calls, and chat messages.
Our mission was to build a single-screen experience for front-line agents that delivered greater efficiency. We were to equip agents with all information they needed to “wrap a contact” from within one window. This vision contrasted the status quo: a hodgepodge of home-grown, acquired, and licensed tools where, for instance, a chat window might be open in one browser window, information about a customer in a second, their order in a third, and additional content such as a product description page on wayfair.com or a knowledge base article on some standard operating procedure likely requiring a third and fourth tab or window.
Starting with initial wireframes, prototypes, and concept demos to director-level audience, I designed most major functionality of Bento. This included the navigation, division of space between apps and panels, and changes to existing chat and email apps so they would work in this new environment. A fellow designer Rachel and I redesigned the customer info, order info, product info, and search & knowledge base apps. I also developed UI guidelines for existing and future apps that the platform was looking to host. I co-facilitated biweekly focus groups for months at a time to both evaluate recently released feature sets and uncover priorities for next ones. I also contributed points of view for both the go-to-market strategy and structure of the incubation teams that beta-tested the new platform.
Over the course of 16 moths of continued development, the Bento platform achieved global front-line adoption of 100%. In addition to savings from non-renewals of third-party licenses and reduced downtime, the new platform both increased agent efficiency on chat and agent satisfaction across channels. The maximum simultaneous chats that could be routed to an agent went up from 3 to 4. While NPS scores for tools that were replaced were not available, iterative development brought Bento’s NPS from 15 in the earliest beta to over 60. Strategically, Bento’s contemporary technology stack allowed our engineers to actually fix bugs and add features rapidly. It also unlocked paths for Bento to start serving departments other than customer service (sales, partner ops) and to expand channel coverage in the future (SMS, virtual assistant, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage for Business).
This adoption milestone was a tremendous achievement recognized across the company. It required collaboration across functions and departments, a new release processes, even a new compensation structure for agents who tested beta releases during incubation. I’m indebted to Ann, Bonita, Brian, Claire, Ganesh, Josh, Kalle, Leslie, Rachel, and Rajesh across product management, engineering, QA, and design.
All in One
Our agent will receive a contact, greet a customer, verify their identity, review a problematic item from their order, look up a procedure on how to deal with a problem, and submit a resolution all in this window. While the first customer is deciding on the best resolution for them, the agent will already be diagnosing a second customer’s problem without missing a beat, all in the same window.
Micro Front-Ends
An agent’s workspace is made up of independent apps. Yet they run seamlessly together because Bento platform equips apps with means of communicating with one another. The end user isn’t aware that various teams maintain each app. The key benefit of this approach is that when one app becomes unresponsive, it does not bring down the entire product, a common problem with monolithic architectures.
Multi-Channel
The Comms panel could be populated by the chat, email, or phone apps, depending on the agent’s shift. I experimented with automatically adjusting the width of the Comms panel based on the active channel to minimize wasted space. Ultimately, we made it a user preference, allowing the agent to control the amount of space taken up by each panel by dragging a vertical divider. This personalization, achieved through a 4px-wide interactive border, was polled as the single most highly rated feature we ever released.
Intuitive Automations
When an agent switches between two or more chats, the order information on the right switches to match. Tab selection too, is preserved during switching, eliminating the need for excessive overhead associated with multi-tasking. When a chat is resolved, there are no old windows to clean up. Other automations include automatic upload of photos sent by the customer via chat to the Order&Product app.
Integrations
Apps aiming to run on Bento had to adhere to a set of engineering and design requirements. Guidelines and standards I developed for other designers outlined Bento’s unique environment and illustrated how to design new or modify existing customer service apps so they would work seamlessly with Bento. These guidelines helped bring standalone customer service apps as well as apps from sales and partner ops departments onto the Bento platform.
Impact
A group of beta-testers used and rated new releases of Bento every other week for several months. We called this process incubation. Initially, when we started from scratch, satisfaction scores were predictably low. However, through effective prioritization of beta feedback and iterative improvement with each sprint, we achieved about 70% of testers rating their satisfaction at 9 or 10. The result was deemed good enough for an initial launch in March of 2022. NPS, tracked separately, also rose form 15 to 60. The enthusiasm of partners in operations, who even made Bento t-shirts to celebrate the launch, made the impact feel more tangible than mere metrics. As of late 2024, over 3 years since they first adopted it, these same departments continue to operate on Bento. An external digital transformation consultant recognized Bento as one of the best customer service systems they had encountered across industries.