AlphaSights · 2020
Streamlined scheduling meetings across timezones that saved £150k+ a year
I proactively identified and tackled the problem, advocated its importance to stakeholders, and led the design process through to implementation. Since shipping, the feature has saved the business over £350k a year.
- Role
- Lead product designer
- Duration
- 6 months
- Client
- AlphaSights
Context
AlphaSights is a global knowledge search platform that connects clients with industry experts, consultants and professionals to provide insights on specific topics. The platform enables on-demand consultations, market research and tailored services to support decision-making.
While researching pain points within the internal platform, I noticed a recurring issue among associates. Although the problem wasn't within my contracted responsibilities, I took the initiative to persuade the product owner of its significance and advocated for its resolution.
Problem
Associates faced significant challenges scheduling meetings between advisors and clients across time zones, with offices spanning Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, Berlin and London.
Coordination was time-consuming: associates spent considerable time deciphering time zone differences. Rescheduling increased, negatively impacting client and advisor satisfaction. And the process was error-prone — applications like Outlook lacked features to display current times across multiple zones, requiring manual calculation in separate tabs before returning to the calendar.
Exploring opportunities
How might we create an end-to-end experience that reduces rescheduling, streamlines the associate workflow, and saves time and cost?
Success metrics
- Reduce reschedules
- Monitor the frequency of meeting reschedulings before and after implementation.
- Error rates
- Quantify the reduction in errors or discrepancies in scheduled meeting times.
- Time saved
- Measure the reduction in time associates spend on scheduling tasks.
- Client and advisor satisfaction
- Satisfaction resulting from a smoother process with less back and forth over email and fewer reschedules.
Solution
Scheduling should not be difficult. This implementation increased people's productivity and reduced the room for conversion errors.
Design considerations
A closer look at the decisions behind the scheduling interface.
Ideation
Time spent wireframing with the team — engineers, product managers and associates.
