Over the past year the design team at
Kustomer has doubled down on the basics. One of our primary principles is - The brand makes a promise and the product pays that off. As you can see our brand is brand new and our
marketing team has been hard at work with new colors, new font, new Kusty, and a new wordmark. These updates provide product design the opportunity to take a fresh look at the product and improve our design and user experience.

Design loves history. When we embarked on this journey we first thought about where we came from. Nine years ago we identified the future of customer service software. We’d seen enough of disconnected data, disparate channels, and manual processes. It became clear that the future of brand building centered around customer service as a differentiator and we set out to be the leader - designing a single, unified timeline that was first of its kind.

We next took a look at where we were. There was a lot to like about our product but there were a number of things that needed to be modernized, centralized, and unified. With a big focus on new features and supporting new use cases, consistency got away from us in some parts of the product. After performing a full audit of the product we had a good sense of what needed to be enhanced.

Finally we took a look at the future. AI + humans in the loop is here, now, and our product offering is ready. We have an entire team dedicated to innovating on AI and we’re excited to build on top of our current AI features.

But before we fired up Figma and jumped into tackling enhancements and new AI powered features, the product design team had to sit down and think about what actually makes a great Saas product? ‘Great design’ is too simple. So we went where designers do - off to the land of sticky notes and dry erase boards. We came out of those workshops believing that great products:
1. Solve a real problem for real users. 2. Continually get better. 3. Have great customer service support. 4. Are easy to use.

Solving a real problem

From ecommerce to healthcare, travel to insurance, we designed a platform flexible enough to handle a wide breadth of customer service use cases. The centerpiece of our platform: one timeline + all conversation channels + a powerful CRM + powerful workflows. Since launching in 2015 we’ve facilitated millions of customer service interactions: refunds, returns, FAQ requests, rebookings and even the simple “how do I do X?” requests.

It’s continually getting better.

Our team has continually invested in new features and enhancements. Just this year, 2024, we’ve added Native Voice, AI and Tasks along with a number of ongoing enhancements. This focus has landed us top scores on G2 Crowd and GetApp, but honestly, we’re most proud of creating a lot of smiles for our customers, customers and helping to build brands through superior customer service. Always listening to our customers, always innovating on the platform.

It has great customer service support.

Since we’re in the customer service business we like to think this one is in our DNA. Our implementation specialists, CX team and customer service team are all plugged into Kustomer and use it on a daily basis.

It’s easy to use.

This is where we made our design investments that launched today. This summer our product design team gathered feedback from our customers and assessed the product across a number of areas. What you’re seeing today is a full product update where we made more than 200 enhancements to the current Kustomer App. (Stay tuned for a more holistic redesign coming soon.) While every page was touched we were mindful that customer service is all about efficiency, so the framework of the Kustomer App stayed true.

A few principles guided us:

• Move or remove - in the spirit of bringing more features to agents and admins we found places where the UI had become cluttered. In some places we moved information into navigation elements or components that was previously exposed. In other places we realized that the information being displayed did not help triangulate information and we removed it.
  

• Information Hierarchy -
  Since much of the information we are presenting to agents is text based. We found many opportunities to prioritize information through better layout, text hierarchy and more logical grouping.

Branding

First up. If you haven’t read - we rebranded! A new wordmark, a new logo, new colors palette and it’s all about a new AI focused Kustomer. We’ve introduced some of this new branding flourishes in the product and we will continue to roll out updates over the next quarter. Read more about our rebrand here.

Navigation

In the newest release of the Kustomer App we’ve concentrated navigation options to the left panel. Users will now find an updated global search, notifications and recent updates there allowing for more focus and fewer on screen icons. Additionally we’ve redesigned the top navigation to be more consistent by moving labels and actions into the body - where the action is.

Icons

At first glance you’re going to see new icons sprinkled throughout the Kustomer app. The shape and style inspired by our new branding with elongated, softer edges that are more friendly but recognizable. We selected hollow icons that help reduce the density of information - especially prominent on the Kustomer timeline.
It’s the little things that tie a product together and we’re excited to introduce items that improve understanding and efficiency.

Global Search

We’ve moved global search over to the left hand navigation. While we were there we cleaned up icons and font hierarchy so the information returned looks like information returned and not a label. We’ve also added the ability to move the search modal around the screen - no longer locked to the top navigation. We have some exciting fast-follow AI items coming here - stay tuned!

User Settings

Lots of big updates here. As with other product areas you’ll see new icons. We’ve put the focus on the agent here at the top of the panel with a more pronounced avatar and name. We removed unnecessary explanatory text and updated some labels for clarity. The addition of a capacity bar gives an “at a glance” view to how much work an agent can take on. And changing your availability and team is now more clearly presented.

Inbox

For the inbox we made some simple visual updates. The hollow icons make an appearance here and help to place focus on the text. We redesigned the tags to be a bit smaller and reduced the color density. Font hierarchy adjustments, made across the entire app, are visible here coupled with the date displayed on a separate line for better scalability. We also redesigned the active and hover states with new color and shape.

Message bubbles

The Kustomer platform is primarily a conversation platform - so there’s quite a bit of information that goes back and forth between customer <> agent, especially in chat. We redesigned the message bubbles to include the reference data associated with text (data, status, etc) allowing only the system messages to sit outside the bubbles. This visual clean up reduces the association thrash of what data goes with what message bubble. We’ve also added a more visible indication of when a message is read - mirroring what we see in text messages on mobile.

Reply editor

Staying in the timeline area our design team took a fresh look at the reply editor - where an agent initiates conversations with the customer. We added rounded corner styling and slight border changes along with a darkened header to help punctuate the feature. We redesigned the tabbed actions for reply and note.
to > from selector to the same line - saving vertical space and and aligning with next action after selecting reply type. We also added logic to display or hide cc and bcc information. Finally we placed the reply/send type behind a kebob menu to reduce visual clutter.

Insights Panel

Some simple changes here to align with branding. New icons and container shape coupled with a reduction in drop shadows. We reduced the lines breaking up the sections and rounded the edges to align with branding.

We have a few other design enhancements we’re still fine tuning that will be launching in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for updates to Voice + Queues and Routing as well as some additional branding and global design component updates.