Are remote workshops an effective way to gather requirements?

Summary

My task was to design a new software product to help call centre support staff fix customers' problems. I needed a good understanding of what the job is like, day-to-day before starting.

Workshops are a tool to help gather requirements at the discovery stage of product development. The problem was now I had to do them remotely and was sceptical that this would be as effective and productive as face-to-face sessions.

Goal

The goals of the workshops were:

Anticipate potential problems customers may have and how support reps planned to fix them
Better understand support reps workflow and what steps can be improved

Hypotheses

Remote workshops will not be as productive as face to face sessions at uncovering users and stakeholders requirements.

Introduction and context

The main business reasons to redesign the software were it was not ACA security compliant and did not support multi-partner login. Main technical reason to develop new software was the current indexing was not very efficient and took too long to return search queries.

The team were quite happy to start with just these basic requirements. My role is to design a system built around the users' needs and top tasks. Clearly understanding what problems they have and creating software that solves problems easily and effectively. That is the main reason for organising the workshops; to help the whole team understand and buy into helping the user solve their problems.

Example of a Miro whiteboard

Plan for remote sessions

Usually, discovery workshops run with the client and stakeholders in the same room. Due to Covid, this would not be possible so, the plan was to run the workshops over a week. The sessions were one hour long using Microsoft Teams and Miro. Senior stakeholders, designers and team members attended the sessions.

Each session had a theme, e.g. current customer pain points, how will escalation work? and so on. I spent each session discussing one of the themes.

How the workshops went

Sessions went well, I was able to gather the most important end-user and stakeholder requirements, e.g. how to find customers quickly using a MID and clear next steps after a call had ended. Two clear personas were identified the customer service rep. and an admin user. Both needed different functionality.

Other interesting pieces of information were the equipment call centre staff used and flaws with the current software. All the information helped with the design process but would not have come to light unless I spoke with users.

Outcomes and results

Overall I was surprised at how well the remote sessions went, and my hypothesis was incorrect; the outcomes were better than I expected. There are definite advantages to remotes workshops and a few predictable disadvantages.

The main problem service desk have is they can't see the customers' store information. They rely on the customer to describe the issue. Their top tasks are:

Find customers account, the best way is to use a MID
Password resets
Change store address

Read the case study to see how I designed the software around solving the problem and supporting the top tasks.

Advantages of remote sessions:

Shorter sessions are more focused: Usually, with face to face workshops the goal is to gather all the requirements in a day (or two) but, this can be tiring
The outcome of shorter workshops was a more focused look at one theme resulting in more detailed requirements
Sessions were recorded so, it was easy to review later, and I did not need to take photos of a Whiteboard
Good tools like Miro helped to keep the sessions moving and easy for participants to edit at any time

Disadvantages of remote sessions:

Writing and sketching on a whiteboard is very easy to do face to face but very difficult during a remote session
A tool like Miro may discourage some participants from taking part if they are unsure how to use it