2026 (continued) // Achieve
Team:
My Role: Staff UX Design + UX Research
Product Management, Retail/Debt Relief Director & VP leadership, Engineering & Architecture
Context
Achieve (also known as Freedom Debt Relief) is a digital personal finance company, offering multiple products for clients in need of debt relief. They offer loan options and a non-loan debt relief program, where Achieve Debt Advisors and Consultants negotiate directly with creditors on a client’s behalf.
The Debt Relief team provide clients with a personalized debt relief plan: clients contribute to a dedicated account instead of paying creditors directly, and settlement agents use those funds to negotiate settlements, typically at a large saving over minimum payments.
The Problem
Debt Consultants juggle more than six primary tools during every sales call. Constantly switching between systems increases the time it takes to find the data they need on a given prospect, impacting their connect-to-close rates.
The Opportunity
Debt consultants’ productivity, and ultimately performance, can be significantly unlocked by consolidating and re-routing data from their main tools into a single “pane of glass” application.
Paired with Achieve’s internal AI Superagent ‘AVA’, it also opens the door to automating admin tasks, freeing Debt Consultants to focus on the prospect and the quality of the conversation.
Expected Impact
| Action | Current | With Single Pane |
|---|---|---|
| Time spent searching data | 3-5 minutes per client | 12-15 seconds |
| Time spent drafting communications to clients | 10-15 minutes per email/client | 2-3 minutes reviewing automated draft |
| Closing sales calls, enrolling clients | 4.24% / 2025 avg. | 4.91% |
The Users: Debt Consultants
This project didn’t exactly follow my typical process, we continue to revamp MVP direction and revisit the vision, today. Below is the initial start of the project. Scroll through or click a step to see more detail.
Debt Consultant Tiers:
Agents who own leads and can regularly contact them via call, email, or text. These agents tend to need clear organization.
Agents who conduct ’round-robin’ calls in the call queue. Leads are not assigned to them until contact is made. Some of these agents are newer, so guidance and coaching is important.
Q3 Note: As of this date, these tier structures have shifted from Ownership/ACDC to all agents on ACDC, with two roles: Debt Consultants and Debt Advisors.
The Process
Note: This project didn’t exactly follow my typical process, we continue to revamp MVP direction and revisit the vision, today. Below is the initial start of the project. Scroll through or click a step to see more detail.
Kickoff
With the request from leadership to build the vision for a new ‘Single Pane’ application, I began a project game plan in collaboration with the Retail Sales VP, breaking down the concentric circles of alignment with teams and domains to dive into.
The primary starting point from here was a deep dive into key domains that would feed into the application and the nuances of differing Debt Consultant roles.
Discovery
Here is where I started the capability deep dive and foundational knowledge.
Goal: understand the Debt Consultant’s workflow and observe their primary needs and actions within each tool they touch.
Tools identified: Salesforce, Communicator (dialer, connected to Genesys for call recordings), Grafana (call metrics), Outlook, AVA Copilot (Internal AI coaching), and Upscope (Internal Sales Demo).
Outcome: a deeply documented understanding of tool usage and the call-flow process.
Bluesky Ideation
With a solid understanding and mapped workflow, I could then synthesize pain points into an early vision that includes the primary application capabilities along with AI opportunities.
The biggest vision to capture was a future ai-centric application that not only looks into all the apps agents use, but improve performance with an AI assistant. Such as task handling, follow-up communications and more.
Cross-Team Collaboration
Mapped high-level functionality from each application onto the agent’s actual call-flow and usage patterns.
This was used to share initial findings and vision goal with collaborators; product, engineering, and leads from each product domain, leading to an updated design for agent feedback.
Agent Research and Feedback
Gathered feedback from both agents and their leads with vision goal and early bluesky wireframes.
Methods and audience: 9 round-table interviews and Survey with 19 responses
Outcome: key learnings of the workflow and expectations for a ‘single pane’ application.
Top Mentions:
The friction of toggling between applications was a confirmed critical pain point for agents. When presented the idea, agents were excited for a centralized “command center.”
Agents expressed a need to offload repetitive communication tasks, as well as eliminate manual typing during calls.
There was high demand for a tool that actively supports the agent during calls.
Agents want the application to organize their day by prioritizing “hot” leads and automatically scheduling callbacks.
Remains a top “safety” feature request by agents, preventing pitching to leads that are already enrolled.
- Customization / 10+ mentions:
- Proactive Demo launch / 9 mentions
- Tone and mood analysis / 5 mentions:
Design Recommendations
With solid research completed, I compiled recommendations for the vision of Single Pane, as well as MVP suggested deliverables.
Suggestions
- Automated ‘busy work’ and data entry:
- Real-time Co-pilot assistance
- Intelligent Scheduling and lead prioritization
- Duplicate and enrolled client detection
- Delegation wishlist: Voicemails, Automated communications, Scheduling
Potential Risk: Adoption
A common constraint identified in discussions with Debt Consultants was a hesitancy to adopt, due to a fear of their communications sounding robotic that may lead to losing leads.
Methods to attempt to alleviate this:
- Review mode
- Personalized learning
Vision-setting
Initiated and contributed to the alignment of the team on an initial long-term vision for the experience beyond the MVP, in collaboration with stakeholders.