ABOUT ANYWHERENOW
AnywhereNow (Anywhere365 Dialogue Cloud) is a native communication layer on top of Microsoft Teams and its foundational framework, Azure Communication Services. As one of the trusted Microsoft partner, it leverages existing investments in the Microsoft ecosystem to streamline communications for an accurate, reliable, customer-centric experience. Their omnichannel capabilities create flexibility and freedom to seamlessly reach customers on any communication channel, helping to find speedy solutions, whilst creating the capacity to handle more requests.
The challenge
Supervisors are central to keeping contact centers efficient, yet AnywhereNow’s platform offered them no dedicated space to manage their work. Instead, they relied on scattered plugins that required switching between tools, slowing response times and creating frustration. This gap not only made supervisors’ jobs harder but also left the product trailing behind competitors who offered more integrated solutions. On top of that, the company’s feature-driven approach often prioritized quick requests from sales or customer success over user needs. Features were added reactively, leading to a fragmented product experience that was repetitive, hard to use, and difficult to scale. Supervisors, one of the platform’s key user groups, had effectively been overlooked.
My approach
To ensure the solution was grounded in real needs, I started by mapping the supervisor’s journey inside the contact center. I conducted interviews with supervisors and key stakeholders, and complemented these insights with benchmarking of competitor platforms. Since research budgets were limited, I leaned on observation as a cost-effective yet highly revealing method, visiting our largest client to see firsthand how supervisors worked, where they struggled, and how they improvised around missing features. These activities uncovered recurring pain points: supervisors needed a centralized overview of live activity, better ways to assess and support agents in real time, and more flexible tools for reallocating workforce across channels and units. Crucially, the research highlighted that “more features” was not the answer, supervisors were already overwhelmed by plugins and disjointed add-ons. Instead, they needed a single, intuitive dashboard that brought clarity, not clutter.
SOLUTION
I designed a Supervisor Dashboard that consolidated key tasks into one clear, intuitive interface. The goal was to give supervisors a centralized hub where they could monitor operations in real time, support their teams, and make faster, better-informed decisions. Key features included: Real-time monitoring: A dashboard with live stats and filters, allowing supervisors to track performance across channels without switching tools. Agent management tools: Options to listen, whisper, or coach agents directly during conversations, replacing disruptive “takeover” actions with more supportive interventions. Sentiment analysis: AI-powered insights to detect negative interactions early, helping supervisors prioritize where to step in. Workforce flexibility: The ability to move agents between units or update their expertise based on workload, ensuring resources were used effectively. Communication improvements: A built-in messaging system for less intrusive communication, plus monitoring for written dialogues. Notification center: Alerts about performance dips or critical issues, keeping supervisors proactive rather than reactive. By focusing on clarity and usability, the dashboard not only gave supervisors the tools they had been missing but also made those tools seamless to use, reducing complexity rather than adding to it.
RESEARCH
To inform the design of the Supervisor Dashboard, I conducted interviews with key stakeholders and Supervisors and created a user journey map to understand how they interact with the software. Two benchmark analyses helped identify industry best practices. Insights from this research revealed the need for: A centralized overview of the call center for workload-based workforce allocation Real-time agent assessment Tools for listening, whispering, or taking over conversations Sentiment analysis to flag potentially problematic interactions Channel-specific filters to help management prioritize tasks This research ensured that the final dashboard was grounded in user needs, making it both usable and impactful.
