A Design Thinking project on workplace stress and its relation with physical spaces at SIM 24h, the contact centre department of Grupo Segurador Banco do Brasil e MAPFRE (Brazilian-Spanish joint venture that is one of the main players in the insurance market in Brazil).
The challenge
Due to an announced change for the floor layout, the innovation area was tasked by the managing director of the contact centre department to investigate and collect insights about the common spaces of SIM 24h and the well-being of its more than 600 operators in the CENESP office and 1500 operators in the entire network.
A Design Thinking approach for the project was chosen with the objectives of reducing the contact centre operator’s discomfort related to client calls and generating new ideas for a physical space.
Immersion
In order to get closer to the context of the project and empathise with the contact centre operators at SIM 24h, research was conducted through an initial exploratory online survey and one-to-one qualitative interviews.
Perceptions about the department, the team, the work environment and others topics were shared by those interviewed and other observations made by the innovation team about behaviours and the workspace were also collected at this stage.
Analysis
After the interviews, all project data was analysed and assessed with the objective of visualising patterns in the field findings. Two journeys were created according to the distinct roles in the department: one for the contact centre operators, with shifts along the twenty-four hour operation of the customer contact centre department, and another for the “administrative” employees, and call centre supervisors, which follow a more traditional eight-hour work shift.
Ideation
A round of collaborative idea generation was organised with participants from different roles from the Customer Contact Centre department. The participants were presented blank cards with a relevant quote about the project and tasked to use that to complete the persona, in order to help with the quality of the subsequent ideas.
After this stage, the participants were instructed to generate ideas for a decompressing space for the different types of personas and their pain points that have been found in the activity.
The conclusion of this project presented ideas from the innovation team by assessing the different personas, important moments in the journeys, and addressing the challenges of the project. The project report was delivered to the responsible areas with recommendations for next steps, where ideas are assessed in relation to quality, impact and viability, and finally tested and prototyped prior to the implementation.