Designing a High-Stakes Call Centre Dashboard for a National Services Company

A dashboard redesign for call centre agents handling emotionally charged, time-sensitive calls — built entirely without direct user access.
2-week engagement focused on clarity, empathy, and system smarts.

Headquarters

Headquarters

Specialist national service provider operating in a niche compliance market

Industry

Industry

Customer Support
Internal Tools
Compliance Services

Challenge

The client needed to rebuild their internal call centre dashboard — but with no access to agents for interviews or testing. The legacy system buried basic customer info behind too many clicks and technical search fields, leaving agents unprepared during critical calls.

The challenge:
Design an interface that gives agents confidence the moment a call starts — based purely on second-hand SME input.

Results

  • Improved first-call readiness with glanceable info at call start

  • Cut down agent anxiety by showing what's missing up front

  • Replaced complex multi-field search with a single-field UX

  • Built stakeholder trust with smart personas that filled the research gap

Process

Proxy Research & Personas

  • Interviewed the client's SME to reverse-engineer agent mental models

  • Built data-informed personas to map goals, pain points, and stress triggers

  • Identified that agents often felt anxiety in the first 10 seconds due to lack of context

Clarity Over Clicks

  • Mapped current-state UX and pinpointed click-heavy bottlenecks

  • Framed the core design question:
    “What do I need to know the moment the call starts?”

  • Prioritised visibility, not density — surfacing only what’s needed, right when it’s needed

Design Solutions

  • Designed a glanceable dashboard showing ID, status, and pending actions

  • Introduced “missing info” alerts to guide agents in asking the right questions

  • Replaced legacy search UI with a fuzzy single-field input for faster, smarter results

Product Thinking & Dev Collaboration

  • Worked with devs early to confirm search logic matched API limits

  • Provided fallback states and loading behaviours for error-prone flows

  • Partnered with PMs to prioritise what shipped first, and what could wait

My Role

I led the UX from ambiguity to clarity — building structure out of limited access and reverse-engineering workflows from SME insights.

  • Persona-builder without user access

  • IA nerd with empathy for frontline pressure

  • Bridge between design intent and technical reality

Conclusion

This was design without a safety net — no user interviews, no live testing, just second-hand insight and a lot of smart questions. By building strong personas, prioritising clarity, and staying dev-aware, I helped turn a messy internal tool into a dashboard agents could trust — even under pressure.