Feeding back the result of a workflow-driven process to its design with a single Path-Colored flow diagram

An initial analysis of the flows of the self-care portal of a telecom service provider revealed that most consumers did not follow the process to a conclusive end. The percentage of consumers that abandoned the process, was too high to believe they all resolved their problem. A high number of unsatisfied customers, losing their faith in the support channel, means a high risk for churn, which ruins the competitive telecom business. At Bell Labs, we mapped the log data of the flows back on the workflow that drives the self-care portal, to derive insights on where and when abandons happen in the process based on summary tables and graphs. This paper describes the three techniques we applied to create a novel path-colored flow diagram, and illustrates it with an example based on real customer data. Based on this graph, we could reveal important trends of customer be- havior with respect to the workflow structure behind the self-care portal. When customers get lost at a certain question, not knowing what to an- swer, they either abandoned immediately or started to wildly traverse the workflow eventually abandoning at a random page when they lost patience. In order to reduce the abandons, it was clearly not enough to just refactor the workflow by reshuffling the order of questions; both the formulation of questions and answers as well as the usability of the portal as a whole needed to be reviewed in depth. A (less important) question that is not yet addressed is how to distinguish a forward success from an unsatisfied abandon in the analysis.