Kellogg’s - international food brand and parent company to Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Eggo, Cheez-It, and more - was wasting resources on employee technical support questions and requests. In order to make it easier for employees to get answers to commonly asked questions and quickly add requests for new hardware/software, Kellogg’s approached Marcel to update the employee portal user experience.
The Challenge
With employees located all over the world, Kellogg’s needed a way for those employees to request new software or hardware, along with the ability to ask questions and provide feedback to Kellogg’s. To do this, they created a phone support system that employees could call to put in those requests and ask questions.
There was just one issue: the support line became a drain on resources, driving up internal costs to the tune of around $15 per call. Kellogg’s discussed how they could still provide the same level of support to employees while also lowering costs. After many discussions, the decision was made to focus on leveraging an employee portal to host requests and and answers to commonly asked questions.
Kellogg’s approached Marcel Digital’s UX / web development experts to rethink the entire employee portal experience to facilitate requests complete with a FAQ section that employees could quickly learn how to use and leverage when needed. This didn’t just mean updating the portal to look better. It meant handling requests and questions in a more efficient manner and making it easier for employees to use the new portal without much training or hand-holding.
The Analysis
To get started, the UX and usability experts at Marcel Digital took a deep dive into the existing employee portal to better understand how they were using it, what challenges they encounter, and what could be improved quickly. We then sat down with key stakeholders at Kellogg’s who provided a full presentation on usability metrics and internal feedback of the portal. They also identified some of the key areas the portal had to include in order for the project to be successful. This included a way for employees to easily request new equipment or hardware, as well as a comprehensive Knowledge Base resource section.
The Solution
Our UX experts started with ideas. These ideas turned into whiteboarding and extensive wireframes accounting for the entire user journey; from the login page to the new and improved Knowledge Base. We then collaborated with the design team at Kellogg’s to bring the wireframes to life. It was developed entirely on a test portal where functionalities and features could be tested and approved by Kellogg’s stakeholders. We focused on surveying employee end users to solicit their feedback in improving the overall user experience. The entire process resulted in a new Kellogg’s employee portal that was easy to use and easy to navigate.
The Results
We focused on simplifying the layout of the portal so employees could easily find important assets and features they were accustomed to finding in the old portal, while also giving prominence to request and Knowledge Base functionalities that they could now use instead of the phone support line.
All of these layout changes and functionalities lead to support phone calls decreasing by 57%. More employees were using the portal to put through requests and leveraging the Knowledge Base for important questions and answers. This decrease in phone calls meant costs from support calls were lowered by roughly 75%, accomplishing the goal of lowering Kellogg’s costs while making it easier for employees to access information quickly and efficiently.
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