Josh Sullivan
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Case study · Research & strategy

Asurion Expert Workspace Messaging Discovery

Deep research and design into the real experience behind a live messaging platform.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Company
Asurion
Asurion Workspace messaging view with a long customer conversation thread and expert side panel.
Messaging view, with a customer conversation thread alongside the expert panel.
01 — Context

A live platform, unexamined

Asurion's customer service messaging platform was live and in active use, but no one had looked closely at how it was actually performing. I conducted deep qualitative research across transcripts, live sessions, and customer surveys, then designed a suite of features to address what I found. My goal was to create visibility for common issues for both the customer and Asurion's customer service agents.


02 — Methodology

How I got there

Analyze transcripts

Read through a large volume of real expert-to-customer message transcripts to identify recurring patterns in language quality, flow breakdowns, and missed opportunities.

Session observation

Watched live and recorded sessions of experts interacting with customers in real time — surfacing behavioral patterns that transcripts alone couldn't capture.

Review customer survey responses

Analyzed customer survey responses to cross-reference what users were experiencing and feeling against what the sessions and transcripts were showing.


03 — Findings

What emerged wasn't one problem but several

Communication quality and response speed, sales messaging that felt pushy rather than helpful, and repetitive interactions that should have been handled by automation long before reaching an expert.

Communication quality

Frequent typos and poor grammar eroding trust in expert responses.

Sales experience

Awkward, pushy sales pitches disrupting natural conversation flow.

Operational efficiency

Inefficient flows requiring experts to manually collect basic customer info.

Bot utilization

Bot capabilities underused — not handling routine intake that it could own.


04 — Explorations

Designing against each finding

Three directions came out of the research, each aimed at a specific problem area above.

Streamlining the conversation & bot handoff

Shifted routine conversation setup to automation: bot-led intake, an auto-generated issue summary, and a ready-to-send first response waiting for the expert on arrival.

Grammar support

Designed support for the human side of messaging — catching grammar issues and style guide deviations before they reach the customer.

Auto-suggested responses

Paired with the bot handoff, suggested replies drawn from the conversation context gave experts a faster starting point than typing every response from scratch.


05 — The deck

Here's the deck

The full research readout, presented to leadership.

Open the full deck ↗


Where it stands

I shared the findings with my team and leadership to create visibility for core issues the business needed to address, which helped get higher-priority initiatives onto the roadmap.