Hall of Fame of Rondesignlab - Köhler

The beginning

• Our collaboration began with a critical challenge: Kohler was drowning in customer support requests. Their success had become their burden — with an overwhelming volume of calls flooding their support team, primarily from customers struggling to identify products they'd purchased years ago.
  This resulted in Kohler’s team getting stuck and many departments just dealing with chaos.

The dilemma of success…

• See, Kohler is a victim of its own greatness. They are so established and so trusted that everyone wants a piece of them, which means everyone calls them when their 10-year-old faucet decides to act up.
  Kohler's team told us about just how many requests they had. Everyone suddenly went silent…

• 4 out of 5...

  ...Kohler clients were contacting customer support at least once during their journey. This wasn't just busy; this was a support department operating in chaos that looked more like a typical scene from the Office series than a normal working environment.

• "It's always the little things that break the whole system. Fifty-six percent of the calls - over half! - were just people asking, “What is this thing I bought 8 years ago?” It's a manual effort that should have been automated yesterday." That's about how we remembered Kohler talking about the issue…

Investigations

• Managers were basically running a detective agency. Customers would call without a model number, a serial code, or even a proper description. A simple support request instantly turned into a frustrating, time-consuming investigation.

Designing the "Scout" (the Tool)

• Creating the identification tool - the Kohler Scout - was not about just slapping a search bar on the web page, no…our real challenge was creating a system that could take messy, unstructured data, like a blurry iPhone photo of a shower head or three jumbled numbers scrawled on a warranty card, and accurately match it to the exact right product within Kohler's gigantic catalog.

• Data Archeology

  We had to work with Kohler's data team to meticulously map, structure, and index their entire product lineage - including retired pieces and every tiny replacement part. This was the unglamorous, foundational work that makes everything else possible.

• Input Versatility

  We made sure the Scout wasn't fussy. Did you take a terrible photo of the faucet? Upload it! Do you only remember a weird five-digit code? Search it! Image Recognition and Partial Code Search were non-negotiable features.

• The First Line of Defense

  Our strategic UX move was placing Kohler Scout right at the front door. It became the helpful concierge, guiding customers instantly to the right resources, deflecting those easily answered, automatable requests before they ever reached a human.

The result

• Two months of intensive, collaborative, and, yes, productive design work later, Kohler Scout launched. It was effective, it was intuitive, and it was incredibly accurate. We were excited to see the Scout in action. Tears down our eyes, ear-to-ear smiles - the product was amazing. We released it and watched it go help Kohler's customers.

• Request Deflection

  The number of support requests instantly dropped by a breathtaking 62% in the first quarter alone.

• Efficiency Gains

  The pressure on support managers evaporated, allowing Kohler to right-size their bloated team by a factor of four.

Our lesson

• We learned once again that the most complex problems often require the simplest, most elegant UX solutions.
  Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go reimagine what a button should look like…guess, we won't get the light of day we begged for.