Case Queues
SUMMARY
This project focused on enhancing Cases, the customer care experience within Sprout Social, a social media management SaaS platform.
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Sprout Social's ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for Cases are large enterprise organizations with high message volumes on social media. These customers require effective customer care to efficiently address inquiries, complaints, and feedback—key to keeping their own customers satisfied, reducing support costs, and building brand loyalty.
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However, Sprout’s original setup—where "teams" were limited to a single case queue—restricted flexibility and made it difficult for these companies to customize their support workflows to meet unique needs.
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To address this, we redesigned the system to separate queues from teams, providing companies with greater control over how messages are managed. This update streamlines message handling, enables smarter case routing and prioritization, and establishes a foundation for future scalability. By improving support workflows, ICPs can create a superior experience for their customers
ROLE
Product Designer
RESPONSIBILITIES
User Research
Wireframing
Product Strategy
UX Copywriting
Prototyping
User Testing
TEAM
Product Designer (me)
Product Manager
2 Web Engineers
2 Platform Engineers
1 Engineering Manager
THE CHALLENGE
Lack of Flexibility and Misaligned Customer Expectations
​Sprout Social’s current case management structure, with its 1:1 relationship between teams and queues, presents several significant challenges for larger enterprise companies—our ICPs—especially those with complex workflows and high message volumes.
Key user challenges include:​
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Limited flexibility in queue management: The 1:1 team-to-queue structure limits the ability to customize workflows for efficient case routing, which hampers scalability.
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Misalignment with customer expectations: There is an expectation that queues operate independently from teams, and the 1:1 structure forces workflows into fixed boundaries, causing confusion and limiting flexibility.
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Inefficient workflow customization: Inefficient workflows make it difficult to handle incoming messages, creating bottlenecks that slow response times and hurt customer satisfaction.
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Reduced visibility and reporting: The current structure makes it hard for care managers to track team performance and queue metrics, limiting visibility into workload distribution, performance, and queue health, which are crucial for effective customer care.
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These challenges point to a need for a more flexible approach where queues can function independently of teams, allowing for better workflows, smoother message handling, and a more satisfying experience all around.
THE SOLUTION
Decouple Teams from Queues for Customizable, Automated Workflows
To better meet the needs of our ICPs, we proposed decoupling queues from teams and making it a standalone feature. This shift would offer greater flexibility, aligning more closely with our users' workflows and expectations. It would also simplify the terminology between "queues" and "teams", improving clarity and making the feature easier to use.
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And, most importantly, this change would lay the groundwork for more advanced, configurable care management features, allowing us to scale and better meet the case management needs of our ICPs.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Evaluating Competitor Capabilities in Customer Care Queues
I looked at 5 of our top competitors with customer care capabilities, noting the full scope of their queues feature, workflows, and user experience. This analysis helped identify strengths in their solutions and gaps we could address, guiding our design decisions and prioritizing areas where we can differentiate and improve our offering.
USER RESEARCH
Where Are Users Getting Stuck and Why?
I conducted interviews with 7 of our top care users to understand their pain points and validate our assumptions.
Insight 1: The 1:1 team-to-queue structure does not align with customers’ mental model of a queue​
Customers view a queue as a simple "bucket" for cases, but Sprout's use of teams—groups of people—creates a disconnect. This misalignment impacts case reporting, assignment, and team setup.
Graphic from a Design Jam presentation on queues
Teams are a global feature not tied to specific departments, and a queue can only be created with a team. However, 50% of teams aren't used in case management, leading to irrelevant queues and unnecessary complexity for customers.
Graphic from a Design Jam presentation on queues
Features like "teams" and "custom views" are often mistaken for queues, causing confusion and dissatisfaction since queses don't work as customers expect them to.
Graphic from a Design Jam presentation on queues
Since queues are tied to teams, admins must add themselves to each team to view all queues, which is unintuitive and confusing.
Graphic from a Design Jam presentation on queues
Insight 2: The 1:1 team-to-queue structure limits the ability to create advanced care workflows.
Because queues are 1:1 tied to teams, a global feature, we can't develop queue-specific capabilities. Competitors offer advanced, customizable queue features tailored to each customer, aligning with our goal of enhancing configurability for ICPs. Users want this flexibility, but we can't compete until queues are decoupled from teams.
Graphic from a Design Jam presentation on queues
USER STORIES
Seeing it in the Context of the User
Based on insights from the user interviews, I created user stories for care admins and managers to define the focus for the feature:
“I want to create, edit, and delete queues with customizable settings.”
“I want to assign cases to queues based on agent expertise, capacity, and availability."
“I want to easily access all queues.”
“I want to be able to select who can view a queue.”
BUSINESS GOALS
Driving Efficiency, Flexibility, and Customer Satisfaction
The implementation of queues directly supports key business objectives by driving operational efficiency, increasing sales, and improving customer satisfaction:​
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Attract and retain high-volume customers: Queues provide greater flexibility and scalability, making Sprout’s care solution more appealing to large enterprises with complex workflows and high case volumes.
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Increase adoption of the Cases feature: Queues enhance the case management solution with automated distribution and better queue management, encouraging wider use and streamlining the process.
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Improve operational efficiency: Automating case assignments based on agent availability, expertise, and priority boosts productivity, shortens response times, and enables faster case resolution.
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Enhance customization and configurability: Queue-specific features allow customers to tailor case management to their needs, improving workflows and resource allocation.
USER TESTING
Does it solve the problem, and is the solution intuitive?
Using insights from user research, we explored several solutions to address the identified challenges. We then re-engaged the same users to validate the workflows connected to the Queues feature. This iterative process ensured the solution directly addressed their pain points and was intuitive to use.
Prototypes tested with users
User feedback included:
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Feature felt clear with a positive impact on workflows: Users appreciated the feature’s clarity and noted how it simplified and streamlined their processes, significantly improving their workflows.
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Copy throughout the feature was easy to understand: The copy was straightforward, with users able to accurately explain the feature after reading the instructions.
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Consistency across the app was maintained: Users found it easy to identify Queues throughout the app, with routing types clearly highlighted to avoid confusion and ensure a seamless experience.
Overall, users felt the Queues feature would significantly reduce manual effort, enabling them to focus on more critical tasks. One user emphasized its transformative impact:​
“This new feature [Queues] is gonna be a game changer for us… because everything was manual before, it meant that we had to continuously be checking that whilst doing our other things. So this is kind of… saving us across the board."
- Care Manager
This feedback highlights how a well-designed solution can simplify workflows while driving tangible improvements in both productivity and user satisfaction.
DRIVING ADOPTION & AWARENESS
How can users discover and understand the value of this feature?
To help users discover and understand the value of the Queues feature, I pinpointed key moments to introduce complementary functionalities like automated rules. When paired with Queues, these tools empower users to maximize their workflows, streamline processes, and significantly reduce manual effort.
When users create a new Queue, it’s crucial they quickly understand how to route cases into it efficiently. To support this, I incorporated a "Pro tip" into the success toast message that appears upon Queue creation. This lightweight confirmation not only reassures users their Queue was successfully created but also suggests creating an automated rule to optimize case routing.
Success toast with added "Pro tip"
Automated rules provide the most efficient way to route cases to specific Queues, enabling teams to scale operations and focus on resolving cases instead of manually sorting them. By surfacing this functionality at the right moment, we help users adopt best practices and fully leverage the power of Queues.
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This small but intentional design choice:​​
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Increases awareness of automation capabilities.
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Drives feature adoption by linking related functionalities.
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Enhances the user experience by providing clear, actionable paths to value.
By aligning with users' workflows and offering timely, actionable suggestions, we make it easier for them to understand and unlock the full potential of the Queues feature.
THE FINAL FEATURE
Bringing it All Together
After several iterations and rounds of user testing, the final user flow and designs were ready. I took a desktop-first approach, as Sprout's complex features are typically used on desktop. For simpler needs, Sprout offers a separate mobile app, but Queues won't be available on mobile at this time.
User flow from creating a custom queue to a case getting assigned
Some of the screens designed for the queues feature
Handoff documentation to eng
CUSTOMER EDUCATION
Guiding Users to Success
To help customers understand and adopt the Queues feature, I created a simple, step-by-step guide in Pendo. The guide walks users through the feature with clear instructions and helpful tips. By breaking the process into manageable steps, I aim to make the feature easier to learn and use.
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This approach helps users get up to speed quickly, leading to higher adoption and a better overall experience.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Impact and Future Potential of the Queues Feature
The queues feature is a key part of Sprout Social’s strategy to provide more flexible, scalable, and efficient case management tools for large enterprises with complex workflows. It decouples teams from queues and automates case distribution to better meet customer needs. While the feature hasn't been released yet, we expect it to significantly impact how customers manage their cases.​​
Here’s the expected impact:​​
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Increased adoption: This feature is expected to drive more adoption of Sprout’s Cases product, particularly among large enterprises, boosting recurring revenue.
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Increased revenue: The added flexibility will enhance Sprout's competitiveness, leading to higher Average Contract Value (ACV) for new customers and more upsell opportunities with existing ones.
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Reduced churn: With automated workflows and real-time metrics, we anticipate improved customer satisfaction and retention, which will help lower churn.
Based on the numbers, we’re looking at a potential:
20%
increase in conversion rates for high-volume ICP prospects
10%
decrease in churn
15%
lift in upsell opportunities
$2.5 to $3.5 million
additional annual recurring revenue (ARR)
Overall, this feature is seen as a big step toward driving growth and delivering a better experience for our care customers.
