After Go-Live
11.2B+
6x
7000
87%
Tight Timelines, High Stakes
When Accenture Federal Services took over record keeping and call center operations for the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), the scale was enormous: 6.1M+ participants, $895B in assets, and thousands of daily calls.
We faced:
- Legacy systems that hindered agent efficiency
- A short runway to redesign 30+ critical workflows
- Minimal time for usability testing before go-live
No research, no problem?
Due to the sheer volume of work and tight timeline, leadership opted against user research and usability testing relying on training for newly hired agents instead.
In response to this challenge and to prevent designing in a vaccum, I implemented the following strategies:
- Created proto-personas for agents, participants, and leadership, mapping their goals and frustrations
- Built micro-journey maps to expose friction across sticky touchpoints
- Prioritized workflows using a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens, ensuring critical needs were addressed first
Aligning on the landscape
Before diving into wireframes and workflows, it was essential to ensure that every stakeholder had a shared understanding of the problem space.
To create alignment:
- Mapped dependencies between call center tools, security requirements, and participant needs
- Highlighted regulatory and compliance constraints that shaped design decisions
- Documented the pain points in legacy systems that agents struggled with daily
No other single retirement plan serves a participant population that includes people who deliver our mail, protect our nation and orbit our planet.
Vanessa Godshalk, AFS
Designing for two audiences: agents and participants
While the primary experience was delivered through call center agents, every design also shaped the secondary experience for participants on the other end of the phone or live chat.
It wasn’t just about enabling agents to complete transactions — it was about ensuring conversations felt natural, efficient, and reassuring for participants navigating sensitive financial decisions.
Templates as the Foundation of Scale
To accelerate design, I developed standardized record templates: cases, accounts & transactions.
By establishing consistent patterns, we reduced duplication and visual clutter, standardized the user experience across complex scenarios, and accelerated collaboration with development teams, ensuring smoother handoffs and faster delivery.
prototyping complex transactions
Over 30 workflows were successfully implemented, delivering a more predictable, participant-friendly experience across millions of participant interactions.
With templates in place, I rapidly designed 30+ transactions, from simple password resets to complex loan modeling and withdrawals. I acheived this by:
When design meets reality
Go-live on June 1, 2022 put our designs to the test with 6.5M+ participants and call volumes 6x higher than forecasted. Despite the strain, the workflows and prototypes I created gave agents structure in the chaos.
- Clear step-by-step flows reduced agent error under pressure
- Templates provided consistency across high-volume transactions
- Participants experienced conversations that felt steady and guided
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From launch to lasting impact
Post-launch, I worked with operations and training teams to refine flows and prioritize fixes using real call data.
We immersed ourselves in over 1,000 hours of participant calls to hear firsthand where conversations stalled, broke down, or created frustration. We made the following improvements:
- Improved the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) navigation to get callers to the right agent faster
- Increased the historical information available to participants
- Recommended new self-service options to reduce strain on agents
- Promoted the expanded use of the online channels to reduce call volume and strain on agents
Lessons Learned
Test early, test often
Skipping usability testing created challenges at scale, even lightweight testing would have caught issues sooner.
Training is part of the design
Agents needed more time and support to build confidence in new workflows.
Balance the whole system
Designing for agents also means shaping the participant's experience, both perspectives must be considered together.
