Increasing scheduling efficiency and transparency

Our customer service representatives and operations team were frustrated with our legacy provider

For context, our customer service agents are responsible for inbound and outbound telephone and chat communications with clients. These can be inbound or outbound requests for Employee Assistance Program (EAP) clients. The role has quite a bit of additional complexity, but for our purposes we'll be focusing primarily on how they connect clients with provider resources.

My team was tasked with creating a revamped provider booking tool that could be integrated with the new CRM, helping agents search TELUS Health’s roster of clinical professionals, matching clients with the right providers, and completing bookings more efficiently and reliably.

The customer service team needed a better way to search for and book clinical providers. Agents were still relying on a legacy system that lacked important operational information such as Provider alerts

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Our Service-level agreements (SLAs) with enterprise clients also required us to offer care within short time windows. These SLAs helped align UX and business goals early on in the project.

The MVP initially only needed to support booking mental health providers, but we didn't want to design a mental health-only booking tool. I worked with product to advocate for an extensible solution, showing how an experience designed around our immediate needs could eventually support services across the broader TELUS Health ecosystem, including trauma counselling, financial services, nutrition support, etc.

Leadership aligned around the larger opportunity, and we secured additional scope and budget to build a foundation to support other services over time.

The business need came from our operations team, but the real user experience insights came from the people doing the work. I connected directly with 8 customer service agents through interviews and shadowing.

Shadowing was especially valuable. Booking was only one part of a live customer conversation, and agents were often listening, searching, comparing, and explaining at the same time. A flow that appeared simple in isolation became demanding in practice. Agents also had to keep customers informed and avoid prolonged silences, even when their tools failed or they lacked the information they needed.

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I documented the current workflow, identified process gaps, and looked for workarounds agents had normalised over time. We also reviewed existing scheduling products, both internal and external, to understand which behaviours would already feel familiar inside the CRM.

Through this process, we learned about provider alerts, the multiple tools needed to handle different communication modalities, and some of the legacy debt that could be pruned in the new tool.

I also didn't want to reinvent the wheel. With legacy platforms like this, completely changing a professional tool can have knock-on effects on adoption and change management. So we kept the interface familiar to our agents.

I mapped out a high-level service delivery flow, outlining the happy path based on our research and what we were attempting to achieve. There were lots of opportunities for things to deviate, in which case we needed to get the agent back to the happy path as painlessly as possible. The diagram is below.

I also defined four UX priorities for the booking experience. They gave the team a shared direction and became the criteria we used to evaluate concepts and make tradeoffs throughout delivery.

We organised the core experience around a right-side filter panel and provider results grid. The UI was better suited to desktop screens and allowed agents to drill down without committing, improving operational efficiency. It still kept the spirit of the old UI, which made the transition to the new tool more intuitive.

This app redesign was really about meeting our agents where they were, reducing navigation and data queries whenever possible, creating elegant UI paths for finding the right provider, and providing smooth transitions when errors occurred.

For a more detailed breakdown, scroll through the walkthrough below.

After choosing a suitable professional and time slot, agents moved into a confirmation view designed to help them verify the appointment aloud, pass relevant context to the counsellor, and finish the call without losing momentum.

The efficiency gains can't be attributed completely to the new interface. The change in technology and tool stability also played a big part in making the UX better. So it goes without saying the lower average handle time (AHT) improvements were a team effort.

Another win was eventually getting the tool adopted by the trauma team. They were able to build on our technical and UI foundations with minor tweaks for their specific needs. Ultimately the foundations we built could be extended to many of TELUS Health’s service offerings.

By taking our time upfront, talking to stakeholders, and understanding user needs, we were able to create something that worked for our business and agents across multiple services.

A passionate group aligned around a clear mission can raise the ambition of an operational tool. By stating our UX goals and sharing our enthusiasm for the project, we created allies within operations who helped us move beyond a like-for-like replacement.

In a large organisation, good design is a team sport, and the more players you have on your side, the easier it will be to deliver truly valuable user experiences.

As with most things, this is a brief look at the project. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss anything in more detail. I'll do my best to accommodate.

I mentioned that we worked with our trauma team on a location-centric booking tool. Below, you can see some of our initial concepts. The prototypes were received well and helped alleviate one of the big issues our agents had; quickly finding a counsellor that was close and available for scheduled work while also accounting for emergency situations.

We only really scratched the surface, as there were still more questions to answer around multiple referrals and prioritisation, but I think where we landed is interesting enough to share.