A contact center agent handles 40–80 customer interactions a day across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and social. Before Contacto, most of them worked across three to five completely separate tools — a dialler, a CRM tab, a ticketing system, a chat platform, a spreadsheet. Every switch cost a few seconds. Those seconds compounded into missed details, and missed details eroded customer trust.
Plivo already powered voice and SMS APIs for 40,000+ businesses. Contacto was the product built on top of that infrastructure — one workspace for every customer conversation. I owned the Agent Workspace, covering ticketing, conversation management, and call wrap-up.
The tension that shaped every decision:
- Agents think in conversations. Systems track tickets. — A customer who emails, then calls, then messages about one delivery issue should have one record, not three. The design had to live in that overlap.
- The customer can never leave the screen. — I rejected the modal approach early. A modal to create a ticket would cover the live conversation — exactly what agents feared most. The right panel morphs contextually but never obscures the thread.
- Ticket hygiene had to become a behaviour, not a policy. — Ticket creation used to be optional, so it got skipped under pressure. The wrap-up gate made it mandatory but fast: two paths, both ending in Done.
Because this work sits under NDA, the full case study — research, system mapping, design decisions, and screens — lives in a separate deck rather than being published here. You can walk through it in Figma →
