My Role: Staff UX Design + UX Research

Product Management, Retail/Debt Relief Director & VP leadership, Engineering & Architecture

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.

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.

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.

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:

Ownership
Tiers 1 and 2

Agents who own leads and can regularly contact them via call, email, or text. These agents tend to need clear organization.

ACDC
Tiers 3 and 4

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.


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.

This mapped out agent observation artifact helped identify primary areas used, the workspace, and opportunities.

Communicator:

The debt consultants’ dialer and communication hub.

Primary Uses:

  1. Communication: sms, emails, inbound/outbound calls, and voicemail
  2. Recording triggers: credit pull consent and program summary
  3. Task handling: includes calls and messages, additional admin to leave notes, ‘wrap-up’ codes, and archive

Pain Points:

  1. SMS issues: unclear indication is a text has been sent. Leads to agents navigating to Salesforce to check status and/or send from there.
  2. Hidden archived tasks: instead of keeping all communications with a lead in one place, tasks are ‘archived’ leaving them from context view. Agents then have to navigate to archived and search for previous discussions.

Salesforce:

Also known as ‘SUIP,’ Sales Underwriting Infrastructure Platform.

Primary Uses:

  1. Lead Management
  2. Initiate sales demo: triggers a call to Upscope to create a new link for a co-browsing session with the lead.
  3. Program offer generation: multiple estimates created with potential savings
  4. Client and Co-applicant data and cash flow capture: detailed section that captures expenses, income, and budget.
  5. Generate agreements

Also used for: SMS and email templates, starting in Salesforce and opened in Communicator.

Pain Points:

  1. Cumbersome navigation: agents constantly swap from Salesforce to other applications, and tabs within the application. This includes the need to jump between lead data tabs, update info, save, navigate back to debts and refresh to view a new offer.
  2. Inefficient lead management: Many agents have their own spreadsheet with unique organization that includes status, follow up times, and context notes.

Upscope:

Web-based application that initiates our co-browsing session, named Sales Demo.

Primary Uses:

  1. Link creation and sending to client
  2. Walking through sales flow with client.

Paint Points:

  1. Timely process to send/receive: many agents state this process can take up to 5-10 minutes, to copy the link into an email in Communicator or Salesforce, and wait for the link to arrive in the client’s inbox, often times not showing until 5+ minutes later.

This lead to the creation of a full agent process blueprint, an artifact that had yet to be created to visually provide stakeholders a high-level breakdown of an agent’s process from before a call to after.

Bluesky Wireframes

With a solid understanding of the agents’ 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.

The next step was created wireframes capturing the full workflow, pre-call, active call, and post-call, the primary actions during those phases and how each applications’ capabilities would fit into the bluesky Single Pane vision.

Learning Moment: Color-coding the capabilities proved incredibly helpful when sharing this artifact with stakeholders. However, it led to a misinterpretation that these applications would be i-framed into the new app.

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 (28 total)

Outcome: key learnings of the workflow and expectations for a ‘single pane’ application.

Top Mentions:

91%
Unified Workspace

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.”

87%
Automated “busy work” and data entry

Agents expressed a need to offload repetitive communication tasks, as well as eliminate manual typing during calls.

69%
Real-time “Co-pilot” assistance

There was high demand for a tool that actively supports the agent during calls.

57%
Intelligent scheduling and lead prioritization

Agents want the application to organize their day by prioritizing “hot” leads and automatically scheduling callbacks.

52%
Duplicate or enrolled client detection

Remains a top “safety” feature request by agents, preventing pitching to leads that are already enrolled.

  1. Customization / 35%:
  2. Proactive Demo launch / 32%
  3. Tone and mood analysis / 18%

Design Recommendations

With solid research completed, I compiled recommendations for the vision of Single Pane, as well as MVP suggested deliverables.

  1. Automated ‘busy work’ and data entry:
  2. Real-time Co-pilot assistance
  3. Intelligent Scheduling and lead prioritization
  4. Duplicate and enrolled client detection
  5. Delegation wishlist: Voicemails, Automated communications, Scheduling

Potential Risk: Adoption

A common risk 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:

  1. Review mode
  2. 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.


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