Overview

Customer Central was an ambitious effort to redesign the support advocate experience from the ground up. It aimed to replace a patchwork of more than five internal tools with a single, cohesive platform used by Cash App support advocates to investigate issues, take action, and communicate with customers at scale.

The core problem was cognitive overload. A workforce of over 8,000 advocates had to navigate fragmented systems, rigid policies, dense knowledge articles, and unclear workflows while handling live customer conversations. Simple tasks like finding a transaction could require jumping across dozens of tabs. This constant context switching made it difficult to stay focused on the customer and their issue, and as a result, it slowed resolution and weakened the quality of support.

Our goal was to build an intuitive internal SaaS product that reduced this load, supported confident decision-making, and enabled advocates to deliver fast, accurate, and genuinely caring support, even as the business continued to scale.

Approach

I partnered closely with a cross-functional team across product, engineering, operations, and research to understand how support actually worked day to day. We interviewed advocates across teams and experience levels, shadowed live cases, and reviewed recent escalations to surface where breakdowns occurred and why.

This work culminated in a detailed customer journey map paired with a deeper analysis of advocates’ jobs to be done. By mapping the full lifecycle of a support case, from first contact through resolution and follow-up, we were able to identify clear moments where advocates needed to understand context, identify the issue, resolve it, and close the loop. These stages later became the foundation for how the product was structured.

The issue was not a lack of information, but too much information delivered at the wrong time and in the wrong format. Advocates needed situational clarity in the moment, not long articles or reactive searches. This led to a core design principle: information at the point of need.

To validate direction early, I then lead a design sprint with a cross-functional team to generate and prototype solutions, which we tested directly with advocates on a regular basis, to validate our direction before moving into execution.

Solution

The solution reframed Customer Central from a collection of tools into a coherent, advocate-centered workspace, starting with the most critical pain point.

Transaction search & filtering

Over 60 percent of all support cases involved a transaction, yet advocates had no simple way to locate or understand a customer’s transaction and balance history. We introduced a unified transaction table that brought this information into a single, searchable, and filterable view. This dramatically simplified investigation and reduced time spent jumping between systems.

Conversations front and center

From there, we designed a conversation-first UI that kept advocates focused on the customer while relevant context appeared alongside the interaction. The experience was anchored around the live conversation, with the system supporting the advocate rather than competing for attention. Knowledge, actions, and suggested language appeared together within the workflow, helping advocates stay present during high-stakes moments.

Glanceable customer overview

A new customer landing page provided a clear, glanceable overview of the customer and their account. Built around customer-facing objects rather than internal system concepts, it helped advocates orient themselves quickly at the start of a case and ensured advocates and customers were effectively looking at the same product.

Extending our design system

Underpinning the experience was a focused investment in the design system. Customer Central required higher information density than our mobile products while still needing to feel unmistakably Cash. I extended our mobile design system, Arcade, into a desktop-first system by adapting hierarchy, spacing, and layout patterns for complex, long-running support work.

A key principle was to mirror the customer experience wherever possible, keeping advocates aligned with the Cash brand and the language customers see. To move quickly, we re-themed an existing component library rather than building from scratch. This enabled faster delivery, consistent experiences, and a shared foundation teams across the business could build on.

Solution

We shipped version one of Customer Central, which included the unified transaction table and customer landing page. For cases involving transactions, we reduced average case handling time by over one minute. At Cash App scale, this translated to an estimated annual savings of more than twelve million dollars. Average handle time was our primary success metric, and early results showed we were moving it meaningfully in the right direction.

Shortly after launch, the project was stopped as the organization shifted toward AI-first, advocate-augmented solutions. While the direction changed, the work reinforced several important lessons. Being intentional about design led to measurable impact. Having dedicated research allowed decisions to be grounded in real advocate needs rather than assumptions. The platform and data foundations we built also informed later AI experimentation, shaping how the organization approached trust, transparency, and human judgment in AI-assisted support.

On a personal level, this was the largest and most complex project I have led. Despite the pivot, it was deeply rewarding work and a period of significant growth. It sharpened how I think about systems, collaboration, and designing for scale, and it continues to shape how I approach AI-assisted and agentic support experiences today.