SASHA Wi-Fi
At a glance
Problem
A business-critical workflow supported up to two million calls annually, but agents had almost no practical way to influence it. Changes stalled, trust declined and average handle time rose beyond 12 minutes.
Solution
Establish product ownership between operations and development, capture feedback inside the workflow, validate changes through clickable prototypes and deliver smaller, measurable releases.
Services
- Product Strategy
- Product Management
- Workflow Design
- Agents impacted
- 800+
- Calls supported annually
- 1–2M
- Average handle time
- 12 → <9 min
- Increase in agent satisfaction
- 25%
- Estimated annual Tier 1 savings
- $3M
The Context
A national managed Wi-Fi operation supported hospitality, restaurant and retail locations across the country. Venue employees, guests and field technicians contacted support between one and two million times each year.
Agents worked from a browser-based workflow platform that served as their single pane of glass. It guided each call with scripts and troubleshooting steps, created tickets and captured the operational data needed to resolve issues.
The platform was essential for both experienced representatives and new agents learning a complex support environment. At enterprise scale, however, every defect or outdated instruction multiplied across a high volume of calls.
With each call costing approximately one to two dollars per minute, workflow quality directly affected customer outcomes, agent confidence and operating cost.
What was happening before product ownership was introduced?
Agents often had only 30 to 60 seconds between calls. Reporting a problem formally meant emailing a supervisor, who then consolidated feedback before passing selected concerns onward. Most useful product insight was filtered out before it reached anyone able to act on it.
Quality assurance measured whether agents followed the workflow, not whether the workflow itself was correct. Experienced agents knew where it failed, but had little confidence that their observations would reach the right person.
Leadership initially interpreted deviations primarily as adherence or training problems. The people closest to the customer had no practical feedback loop into the product they used every day.
“The agents were not resisting the workflow. They were showing us where the product was failing.”
Discovering the Root Cause
The organization did not have a people problem. It had a learning-system problem.
Interviews with frontline agents exposed the missing feedback loop. Mapping responsibilities then revealed an organizational gap: no single role connected frontline experience to product improvement.
Developers supported many enterprise workflows and did not have enough managed Wi-Fi context to judge what should change. Requirements commonly arrived as written documents and bullet points, while acquisitions and organizational changes had weakened the informal knowledge-sharing that once filled those gaps.
One major workflow overhaul had remained unfinished for roughly two and a half years. The organization had ideas and engineering ability; what it lacked was product ownership capable of turning operational evidence into focused software decisions.
“The breakthrough was putting product ownership where customer reality met software delivery.”
The Product Transformation
Put a product manager at the center of the system
Carl brought firsthand operational knowledge into a dedicated product-management role connecting agents, call-center leadership and development. A small cross-functional team could now translate what happened during support calls into product priorities and testable requirements.
The approach used the organization’s existing development and DevOps resources and strengthened the product layer upstream. It preserved the established SAFe delivery model rather than replacing it.
Better discovery clarified requirements before development began. Limiting work in progress and breaking major changes into smaller releases reduced risk and made outcomes easier to measure.
Product Goals
Adoption goal
Make contributing to the product easy enough to fit between calls, create a visible response to agent feedback and improve managed Wi-Fi workflows broadly.
Software-development goal
Turn frontline observations into contextualized and testable requirements, validate workflow changes before development, reduce batch size and give engineers artifacts they could understand asynchronously.
Business goal
Reduce average handle time below nine minutes while improving agent confidence, customer outcomes, first-call resolution and scalability.
How the System Worked
01 — Capture feedback in context
A lightweight feedback plugin was deployed to more than 200 agents at the Austin operation. Agents could submit feedback directly from the workflow with a screenshot plus session, ticket, workflow position and completed-step metadata. The system initially received more than 200 agent submissions per month.
02 — Turn observations into product decisions
The new product function reviewed submissions, identified repeated patterns, prioritized opportunities and connected improvements to operating outcomes. Feedback became product input rather than another escalation.
03 — Prototype before development
A workflow prototyping engine let nontechnical operations employees assemble clickable support pages. Agents tested proposed flows before production, enabling rapid iteration and replacing Word-document-only requirements with tested prototypes and clear requirements.
04 — Test with the people doing the work
Changes were tested with real agents against operational edge cases. This shortened the distance between ideas and evidence and made frontline employees active participants in product development.
05 — Release in smaller increments
Large workflow overhauls were broken into smaller releases, work in progress was limited and results became easier to measure. The flagship workflow that had stalled for roughly two and a half years was redesigned, tested, developed and released within six months.
Results
A critical workflow became a product that could learn.
- 2.5 years → 6 months
- Stalled workflow to tested production release
- 100+
- Product experiments conducted
- 50+
- Workflow improvements and releases delivered
Operational Impact
Average handle time moved from approximately 12 minutes to 10 minutes and ultimately below nine minutes, contributing to an estimated $3 million in annual Tier 1 savings.
Agent satisfaction increased by 25%, and support eventually extended to more than 800 agents. Clearer workflows reduced dependence on tribal knowledge and helped newer agents become productive faster.
Customer NPS and first-call resolution improved, while transfers to Tier 2 declined. Exact retained figures are not available for those measures, so these outcomes are reported directionally.
From Workflow Compliance to Continuous Improvement
Agents became contributors to the product rather than passive recipients of workflow changes. Experienced representatives gained a constructive way to share operational knowledge, while newer agents benefited from clearer guidance.
Developers spent less time reconstructing operational context, and clickable prototypes improved asynchronous collaboration across operations, product and engineering.
Leadership gained a durable product capability that became integrated into the operation. The transformation changed ownership, incentives and communication—not merely the interface.
Product Magic Begins With a Working Feedback Loop
Successful product development connected frontline reality, leadership objectives, product management and software decisions. Each part of the system could see how evidence became a priority, how a priority became a test and how a validated idea became a release.
Understand the work. Build the feedback loop. Make learning visible. Turn insight into software people adopt.
This is a Fyve Labs Founder Story. The work was led by Fyve Labs co-founder Carl during a previous in-house role, before Fyve Labs was established. Organization, product and customer names have been generalized, and results reflect operational measurements and estimates available at the time.
Your most important workflow should get better every time someone uses it.
Fyve Labs helps organizations connect customer insight, product strategy, rapid prototyping and focused software delivery so teams can move from stalled initiatives to measurable adoption.