AT&T Customer Connect — Warisha Soomro

Context

Note: I joined this work mid-stream — leading some areas, contributing to others.

Enterprise UX at federal scale.

AT&T's Customer Connect portal is the primary interface for agents supporting millions of AT&T customers — handling device returns, account authentication, and compliance-mandated flows. Every second of friction compounds across millions of calls.

My work spanned two distinct challenge areas: omnichannel device-return journeys and FCC-mandated passcode reset flows. Both required designing within legal constraints without making those constraints visible to the user.

Good design here earns trust through clarity, speed, and zero surprises at the moments that matter most.

Impact

Numbers that moved leadership.

$137M

Projected EBITDA over 3 years from omnichannel device-return journey redesign

Business case

$3.3M

Annual savings from redesigned FCC passcode reset flow — 30 seconds cut per call

Operational efficiency

Direct

Prototypes presented to company leadership; recognized for rapid iteration and cross-functional alignment

Executive visibility

Work Areas

Three distinct design problems.

01

Omnichannel Device Return Journeys

End-to-end flows across desktop, mobile, and tablet — transforming complex enterprise compliance into a consumer-grade experience. The challenge: making the mandatory feel effortless.

$137M projected EBITDA · 3-year horizon

02

FCC-Mandated Passcode Reset

Redesigned re-authentication flows while fully honoring FCC requirements. Every second mattered at millions of calls annually. Make a federal mandate faster without removing a required step.

30s cut per call · $3.3M annual savings

03

Design System Contribution

Contributed scalable interaction patterns and components to AT&T's internal design system — defining standards adopted across teams. System-level decisions ripple outward.

Adopted across multiple product teams

04

Cross-functional Alignment

Prototyped at multiple fidelity levels and presented directly to company leadership. Worked across product, engineering, legal, and compliance.

Direct executive presentation

The Design Challenge

Designing within unmovable constraints.

Enterprise compliance design requires a different skill set. The constraint isn't the budget or the timeline — it's the law.

The Constraint

FCC regulations mandate specific re-authentication steps. These can't be removed, reordered, or made optional.

The User Reality

Agents run this flow hundreds of times per shift. Every additional second compounds at massive scale.

The Design Problem

Make a mandatory multi-step compliance flow feel fast and low-friction — without removing a single required step.

Design Decisions

Where judgment showed up.

The constraint isn't a limitation — it's the brief. Good compliance design makes federally mandated steps feel like the only logical path forward.

Warisha Soomro · Reflection on the FCC passcode project

Decision 1 — Consumer-grade clarity in an enterprise tool

Apply consumer-grade information hierarchy to enterprise workflows — not by removing complexity, but by making the right action obvious at every step. Agents shouldn't have to think about what to do next.

Decision 2 — Sequencing for cognitive load

The 30 seconds saved per call came primarily from sequence optimization — reordering steps so agent decisions were front-loaded. The compliance checklist stayed intact. The experience changed.

Decision 3 — Multi-fidelity prototype strategy

Low-fi for flow alignment, high-fi for stakeholder buy-in. Polished prototypes to leadership early created organizational momentum that kept the project moving through legal and engineering reviews.

Decision 4 — Design system as leverage

Contributing to AT&T's design system meant thinking beyond the immediate project — requiring deep understanding of how other teams would adopt or fork our patterns.

Design System

Building for scale.

My contributions to the AT&T design system extended the impact of project-level work into shared infrastructure.

Interaction patterns for compliance flows — standardized how agents move through regulated steps, reducing inconsistency across products.

Omnichannel component variants — desktop, mobile, and tablet components that share logic but adapt to each surface without bespoke overrides.

Edge state documentation — defined error, loading, and partial-completion states for enterprise workflows where edge cases are more common than happy paths.

Adopted across teams — patterns picked up by other AT&T product teams, compounding impact beyond the direct project scope.

Outcomes

What it delivered.

$137M

Projected EBITDA over 3 years from omnichannel device-return journey

$3.3M

Annual operational savings from FCC passcode reset redesign

30s

Time cut per call — at AT&T's call volume, this is significant

System

Patterns adopted across multiple internal teams via AT&T design system