Gustie Experiences & The TaxRes Dashboard
Role: Research & design lead
Timeline: ~4 months
Who are Gusties?
Gusto team members. Specifically, in this case study, we’re focused on the Gusties that serve Gusto’s small-biz employers’ tax issues—the Tax Resolution team.
WHAT I’M MOST PROUD OF
Pairing with engineers
Design solution
Learning a difficult lesson in change management
Collaboration with large number of stakeholders
Establishing experience principles for “Gusties”
Forming a brand new product team
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Gusto’s Tax Resolution team was backlogged 15k+ tax notices & response times were nearing 35+ days.
A ripe opportunity to tackle as a brand new team!
After assessing where we could jump in and make the most impact, this problem seemed to be most important both financially, and for addressing customer pain.
DISCOVERY & RESEARCH
During this early phase of the project, I collaborated with my product manager, engineering lead, data scientist and product specialist as I planned and led the following research activities and methods:
Stakeholder interviews with 16+ service team leaders.
Research and shadow sessions with the tax resolution team to benchmark the full end-to-end experience for Gusto’s TaxRes team.
Service blueprinting workshops to map out and align on a shared understanding of a really complex multi-layered process.
Customer listening sessions where the entire product team could review customer service calls to understand the customer-side of the experience.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
Gusties felt lost
There was no real process to investigate tax notices, so they had to learn via trial and error. It took new Gusties 6+ months to start to feel comfortable in the existing internal tooling system.
Tools weren’t designed for the job
Typically, a Gustie would need to review 9+ different screens and compare against multiple different tooling systems.
The job required lots of memory and mental space
The existing tools has non-existent navigation, so Gusties had to learn to bookmark pages and memorize workarounds to get the information they needed.
EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES
Right information, right time
Guidance is designed into workflows
Use guardrails to prevent errors
Empower Gusties to be the experts
Find and design value opportunities
THE VISION
I facilitated a cross-functional brainstorming workshop to help align the larger team on our research insights, service blueprints, and storyboard. Together we developed a new story and vision for how to best help Gusties resolve tax notices.
Mock-up to visualize our vision for Automated & intelligent insights
Automate anything that didn’t require a human brain & aggregate data to provide intelligent insights.
Use that data to predict root causes for tax notices, and give clear reasons for what led to that conclusion.
Automate meaningful and helpful responses to customers.
We have this data, we shouldn’t have to dig for it.
Mock-up to visualize our vision for Automated & intelligent insights
WHAT WE SHIPPED
While this tool didn’t solve all of the problems these Gusties faced, it was a good first step in making progress towards our vision of a more integrated platform. Where we landed really laid the foundation to move quickly towards our vision and improve the overall workflow and experience.
A first-stop dashboard to uncover the root cause of a notice and begin the process to resolution.
Expanded design system
Developing new components
Gusto’s design system wasn’t built for high efficiency backend tooling. I designed new components that could be reused throughout the internal tools platform.
IMPACT & LESSONS LEARNED
While we were still instrumenting the best way measure Gustie output and productivity, we landed on a metric that best made sense.
We found that, depending on the Gustie, we could see up to a 37% lift in productivity.
This was an exciting win, but it’s complicated..
I learned a valuable lesson in change management and beta vs. launch expectations when it comes to human behavior change.