GM OnStar — Advisor Personas & JTBD Mapping
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Designing a consolidated Salesforce platform for GM's OnStar call centres
As a Senior Experience Design Consultant at Salesforce, I was embedded in a multi-disciplinary team working with GM OnStar to design and build a consolidated Salesforce platform for their contact centre advisors. GM's hypothesis: bring together their fragmented tool ecosystem into a single workflow — scalable, reliable, and fast enough to make them the leader in omni-channel customer experience.
My contribution centred on the user research phase — leading persona development and Jobs-to-be-Done mapping across four advisor types spanning multiple call centres across the US, Canada, and the Philippines. This research directly shaped the design direction for the future-state experience.
Research included 25 user interviews across 2 countries and 3 US states, a co-creation workshop to identify business goals and plan the design backlog, and ongoing refinement sessions with business and tech stakeholders to gather information for features and stories.
Advisors were juggling 8–10 tools to do a single job
Before interviews began, we knew there were too many tools. What we discovered was how deeply this fragmentation had eroded the advisor experience — and by extension, the member experience.
- Advisors started shifts 30 minutes early just to log in to all their tools in the right order
- Scripting and disclosures arrived in daily emails — there was no system of record
- Customer interaction history was incomplete or nonexistent; advisors relied on tribal knowledge and Teams chat
- Transfer rates were extremely high due to over-specialisation across tiers
- Sales advisors manually tracked their own call analytics on personal spreadsheets
- Advisors used Google Maps and Bing to verify locations because the internal tool wasn't trusted
Four specialised roles — all doing the same core job
GM's existing org structure had four distinct advisor types across separate tiers and departments. Through research, we discovered that while the business structures were separate, the underlying user needs were remarkably consistent.
- Onboarding / welcome calls
- Subscription changes & cancellations
- Landline call handling
- No visibility into sales pipeline
- Manual performance tracking via spreadsheet
- Scripting changes arrive via email only
- Member services & navigation calls
- MSTB service — catch-all inbound
- Outbound collaboration with Tier 1
- Plans are hard to compare for members
- Entitlements buried in a long unfiltered scroll
- No visual representation of vehicles
- First line of contact for members
- Case creation & routing
- Triaging & escalating complex issues
- GAM Answers not user-friendly or fast to search
- IA doesn't align with advisor mental models
- Manually write reminders; no in-tool follow-up
- Monitoring team performance & adherence
- Handling escalations from advisors
- Coaching & developing advisor skills
- Even more tools than advisors — copy-pasting to emails hourly
- No analytics without manual report runs
- Siloed team structure limits visibility
One map to simplify four personas into two
Using the JTBD framework, we mapped the core jobs each persona needed to accomplish. What emerged was clear: all four advisor types were ultimately trying to do the same things — resolve member issues quickly, access the right information, and build trust on the call. The specialisation was a structural artefact, not a user need.
This insight led to our proposed simplified persona model — consolidating four roles into two: Advisor and Supervisor.
The full JTBD map used in research, plotting pain points and user, business, and customer outcomes across every stage of the advisor–member interaction.
Six themes shaped the future state design direction
8–10 tools used simultaneously, creating swivel-chair behaviour, data integrity issues, and a fragmented member experience.
Information lived in emails, Teams chats, personal trackers, and tribal knowledge — not in the system. Advisors couldn't trust what was in the tool.
Member history was incomplete and hard to find. Advisors relied on super-sleuthing across multiple tools to piece together context before they could help.
Over-specialisation across tiers led to high transfer rates — impacting FCR metrics and creating a frustrating experience for members who had to repeat themselves.
Advisors memorised processes, manually tracked their own performance, and hand-wrote notes that were deleted at call end — creating unnecessary cognitive load.
Advisors had no way to proactively reach out to members or anticipate needs — everything was reactive, limiting the potential for relationship-building and upsell.
Research artefacts from the GM OnStar engagement
Translating research into a consolidated Salesforce experience
With the research foundation established, the team moved into design. The vision was a single unified Salesforce interface that replaced 8–10 fragmented tools — giving advisors a 360° view of the member and their vehicle from one screen, with clear navigation between Activities, Account Profile, Vehicle, History, Plan, Sales, and Wrap Call.
Key design work included the Purchase a Plan/Product flow — redesigning the product catalogue to make it intuitive for advisors to find, compare, and recommend the right OnStar plans for members. The existing catalogue was complex and hard to navigate; the redesign introduced tabbed plan categories (Plans & Packages, Vehicle Performance, Connectivity, Smart Features), a clear pricing grid, and a persistent cart so advisors could build and review offers without losing context.
A Compare Plans modal was also designed to help advisors confidently explain plan differences to members side-by-side — addressing one of the core research findings that plans were too hard to compare and understand in the current tool.
The legacy tool advisors used to browse and add plans — one of the 8–10 disconnected systems in the original workflow, with dense text-only lists and no way to compare offers side-by-side.
The redesigned catalogue inside Salesforce — tabbed plan categories, a clear pricing grid, and a persistent cart so advisors can build and review offers without losing context on the member or vehicle.
A dedicated Compare Plans view lets advisors line plans up side-by-side with an expandable feature table — directly addressing the research finding that plans were too hard to compare in the original tool.
Research readout and stakeholder handoff
- Delivered a full research readout to key GM and Salesforce stakeholders presenting personas, JTBD mapping, themes, and design recommendations
- Produced a project closure report documenting all findings, design decisions, and proposed implementation roadmap
- Designs vetted for technical feasibility within the Salesforce platform prior to handoff
A research foundation that simplified the path to a unified platform
The persona simplification — from four specialised roles to two — became the strategic foundation for the future-state platform design. By demonstrating that all advisor types shared the same core jobs, we made the case for a flatter, more cross-functional call centre structure that could reduce transfers and improve first call resolution. The JTBD map, personas, and redesigned Salesforce flows were presented to GM leadership as part of the Research Readout and directly shaped the implementation roadmap.