A global telecom had a dozen ineffective and disconnected frontline coaching tools and dashboards. POPflow designed one unified interface that gave agents and leaders visibility into performance and enabled meaningful coaching conversations. It now supports over 55,000 internal users.
01
The Problem
Coaching was buried under the tools meant to enable it.
A global telecom services firm wanted to improve customer experience through better coaching, not more metrics. But supervisors were drowning. Performance data lived in a dozen disconnected tools, none trusted as the source of truth. Every channel, role, and region coached differently. Prepping one coaching conversation meant hand-stitching reports, and by the time the picture came together, the time to coach was gone.
The mandate: give supervisors one place to understand an agent, and the time back to coach them. Oh! …and design it in two months.
Legacy Call Center Agent Coaching Tools
Thousands of Ideas Captured
Organized into Themes and Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
02
The Approach
A UX method before a single sketch.
I led a user-centered process built to pull real signal from a large, opinionated group, without groupthink, and fully remote.
01
Discovery grounded in real needs.
Large-scale design-thinking discovery across every customer-facing channel, using anonymous brainwriting so the loudest voices didn’t steer the room. It set the UX direction and kicked off a relationship where I would go on to run several more discovery workshops at the same scale.
02
From thousands of ideas to jobs to be done.
With a team of managers, I clustered the raw ideas and distilled the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), the real tasks a supervisor needed to accomplish with the tool. Requirements were smartly framed as jobs to design for and test against, not a feature wish list.
03
Positive reinforcement as a guiding principle.
Coach the behavior, celebrate the win. That call shaped every screen, from how a scorecard reads to why the dashboard congratulates a top team instead of just ranking one.
03
The Microburst
The two-hour workshop that replaced a week of meetings.
I adapted the Google Ventures Design Sprint into two-hour remote workshops that fit tight timelines without losing rigor.
I facilitated Microbursts to quickly move from broad thinking to vetted solutions: teams walk in with a problem and walk out with a validated concept, stakeholder alignment, and clear buy-in before development starts.
01
Prioritize.
Rank the critical Jobs To Be Done, so the session aims at what matters.
02
Diverge.
Sketch competing design directions for the coaching view.
03
Converge.
Dot voting focuses the team on the best ideas, and the Decider makes the final call. This approach secures stakeholder alignment early and prevents surprises later.
The winning sketches became the blueprint for the prototype.
Participants Turned Ideas Into Concept Drawings
Participants Surface The Winning Concept
The positive feedback is overwhelming! Here are a few quotes from the focus group [of Supervisors]:
“Our team is excited and inspired. It makes coaching easier.”
“The layout is really easy to understand and read. The interface doesn’t feel harsh like our old tools.”
“It’s a great tool. I was blown away. It’s awesome and is going to bring alignment to the division on coaching practices and opportunities.”
“Hands down this is incredible. Thank you Team!!”
55,000+
USERS
The design’s whole reason for existing, proven out with tool usage metrics.
+8 pt
NPS LIFT
Second place in the client’s internal tool-satisfaction survey, beating well-known off-the-shelf products.
Countless Hours
SAVED
Supervisors stopped hunting for coachable insights and started having more effective conversations.
04
The Design
A coaching tool people actually adopted.
The best sketch became the blueprint for clean wireframes, then high-fidelity Figma mockups, then a clickable prototype. Every metric a supervisor needed pulled into one scannable view and translated into something a leader could coach on.
I tested the prototypes in one-on-one usability sessions and revised the design until it held, then handed it off to developers.
One leader who reviewed the design said, “It’s like going from DOS to Windows 10!”
05
The Partnership
A platform that grew to become infrastructure.
The design worked so well, and delighted users and the business so much that it never stopped. Almost seven years on, POPflow still leads ongoing design, and the platform hasn’t slowed down. New functionality keeps shipping on a steady cadence, quarter after quarter, year after year.
What started as a coaching tool is now the backbone for managers and their teams across the company. Huddles, commissions, incentives, career development, field-technician workflows across residential and commercial sectors, performance metrics of every kind, and more. Each addition erases another swivel between tools, and each one pulls more of the company’s other systems into this one platform.
The telecom has reorganized more than once since this began. New leadership, new priorities, new org charts. The platform outlasted every one of them. Each time, it came out the other side as the tool teams already trusted, so it kept growing instead of getting replaced.
It outgrew consultancy deliverable years ago. Today it behaves a dedicated product, with my design still at the forefront. Every reorg, every new use case, every integration still ends with POPflow designing the experience in the platform.
I have now led countless design thinking and participatory design workshops and have delivered many dozens of Figma mockups and prototypes.
Custom UI Icon Set for the telecom frontline performance Platform
I continue to deliver powerful designs at the client’s request
© POPflow Design LLC · MMXXVI
Jackson Carson, President
Center of POPerations:
Longmont, Colorado, USA
POPixel Promise: Our pixels are sourced from Rocky Mountain RGB and CMYK deposits and refined using traditional and contemporary pixellurgical methods. POPixels are guaranteed not to crack or fade for the life of the product, or until your next rebrand, whichever comes first.