Central States Funds / TeamCare is one of the largest union pension and healthcare organizations in the United States, and they needed an improved UI to their CRM system.

Established in 1955 to provide lifetime monthly retirement benefits to Teamsters in the trucking industry, Central States Pension Fund has paid over $80 billion in benefits to more than 600,000 retirees and beneficiaries. Retirement benefits are funded by employer contributions negotiated to be paid on their behalf for their employees working under Teamster collective bargaining agreements. Their labor health care fund, TeamCare, covers the lives of 500,000 members, from 1,100 different employers, making it the largest labor healthcare fund in the country.

CSF / TeamCare has a unified customer service organization that handles requests, mostly by phone, using a custom-built CRM system to handle its unique needs.

As with many large organizations, its data systems have become layered over time, combining newer systems with legacy databases, with changes over the years to ensure compliance with data privacy legislation such as HIPAA. As pension and healthcare coverage typically includes multiple family members, the system flags if an individual has a privacy issue that should not be revealed to other people, if there are child protection or other cases in place, and so on.

The latest iteration of the CRM system, based on Microsoft Dynamics, pulls information from multiple databases to present a complete “Member 360” view; different departments manage these datasets.

When this iteration was built, using a third-party IT contractor, many of the customer service team’s needs were still not met, and much of the UI was functional, but hard to read because information was not grouped in a meaningful way.

I joined the small, new team that had been set up to improve this system. The previously hired UX person had done a lot of the basic user research, and had come up with initial wireframes / sketches.

My role was to take the initial wireframes, flesh them out into fuller designs, and then iterate on them to create a fuller set of sub-screens for the CRM interface, using a tabbed UI to group functions accordingly. Using roles-based permissions, different users would see different tabs / tab content, again, to comply with data privacy regulations.

I worked on this for seven months, with frequent meetings with end-users to show interim progress and gather feedback, and schedule user tests with call center agents with prototypes.

Deliverables included:

• a full user interface component library and style guide in Figma, including all form elements, typography, and colors
• clickable prototypes for the site navigation, tabs, and sub-tab functions
• Documentation and flowcharts in FigJam