Shopping Journey of Sales Associates

A combined multiple product sales experience for Sales Associates which integrates customer, product and payment management tasks into seamless bundle experience. We went through a constant iterative-phased discover, design, build and test approach

Role

Experience Architect | Interaction Designer

Duration

1.5 Years

Tools

Sketch/Invision, Freehand, Mural

Problem Statement

The current workflow for quoting and binding policies, or reviewing a previously started quote, requires a sales associate to navigate to multiple systems. Navigating to multiple systems on different browsers results in disjoint experience, inefficiency and increased potential for errors due to manual entry of data

UX Design and Research team evaluated the existing experience only to explore how disjoint and painful it might be to the Sales Associates. We proposed 5 options to enhance the current product acquisition experience to the business and technology management. Ultimately, we all agreed upon the option that provided a simplified experience and feasible. The solution should:

Begin and end the interaction within system of interaction and in a single workflow
Initially build a proof-of-concept of an integrated experience for Sales Associates including both a technical Analysis ("can we") and an experiential exploration ("should we")

Disjoint experience flow

Information Architecture

Proposed Simplified Experience

Enhanced Product Selection - Natural transitions between customer management tasks and selection of P&C products for quoting and sales

Salesforce Integration - The ability to remain within Salesforce experience for the duration of an Auto or Renters sales interaction

Multi-product Purchasing Experience - Simplified sales flows for Auto and Renters sales conversations with natural pivots and navigation between products

Automated Opportunity Management - Creation and updating customer opportunities based on outcomes of product quoting and sales activities

Bundled Billing and Payment - Presentation and payment of combined bill for Auto and Renters acquisition

A collaborative team consisting of UX Designers, Researchers, Business Analysts and Techs was established to ideate, build and test a bundled purchase experience through product cart and combined checkout. For initial ideation the team decided to go with the option that proposed using Salesforce canvas approach keeping Salesforce as system of interaction and make it a guided flow. For the initial proof-of-concept, the team picked up two top selling products and use existing product flows for integration into CRM platform.

UX team created an Invision prototype at a conceptual level by stitching the screens from the current disjoint experience for initial round of concept testing.

Researchers conducted usability test on POC to:

Evaluate existing disjoint experience
Probe them on the high level experience of the designs focusing on their general experience, ease of use, efficiency and impressions of the sales processes

Usability test uncovered additional pain points of the existing experience:

Sales Associates must manually transition between systems and calculate bundled price during a sales interaction
Sales associates are only allowed to checkout one product at a time. To checkout multiple products, associates must pend to a legacy system that could handle such type of scenario

Recommendations:

Sales associates have a guided workflow and bundled price available for integrated products. The experience is consistent with the sales conversation
Sales associates can checkout multiple products within the same flow without navigating to another system, streamlined user flow

Experience Architecture to create a guided flow for Lightning Platform

Once the feedback from initial testing was received,

XD team created a guided flow for bundle product checkout through product cart and combined checkout using CRM platform as the System of Interaction
The teams picked up two often bundled top selling products for this integrated experience
Product teams decided to use existing product flows for integration into CRM platform for MVP release

We tested the prototypes:

Allowing users to complete a series of tasks on a prototype of the experience
Collecting observations on where the user struggles/excels
Identifying potential impacts to the user experience and desired business outcomes
Gather user comments and responses through a moderated interview

Usability Test Participants' Feedback:

"I thought it was cleaner, much simpler. I didn't have to open 5 windows to achieve one product purchase"

"I love the cart idea"

"Thats dope, I like that. That is pretty fly"

"I would begin to fall in love with CRM"

Deploy & Test

The team implemented a phased build and test approach. Product team created separate build and releases for individual product purchases. This approach inspired other products lines to build their flows simultaneously and ready for integration with CRM

This this approach included:

Release 1: Use existing Product 1 flow as it is with integration into CRM - released for few Sales Associates
Release 2: Product 2 flow with automation and new look and feel - built, in the process of release
Release 3: Bundle checkout, Product cart designs ready for build, Confirmation Screens in design phase

Onboarding needs further research due to the reason that multiple systems sending documents and emails to the customers. We had received feedback during previous round of testing that this is frustrating to the users as they are not being able to keep track of the emails and thus losing some discounts.

My Contribution

My engagement with this project was on and off based on the the priorities of the other Salesforce project priorities. In the initial phase I brought in the value of my Lightning platform and CRM workflow expertise from experience side. During Release 2 which was product 2 only checkout flow, I wasn't just the CRM/Lightning expert but took the lead level role that included building end to end prototype with new designs, creating user flow for line of business product, architecting, handing-off the designs to the developers. I had also started the discovery of product cart, confirmation + documents + onboarding pages simultaneously for Release 3. We conducted stakeholder interviews and working sessions with the entire team to gather requirements, current processes and understand the gaps. During release 2 phase, we also collaborated with content strategist to define the Sales Associate's voice and tone for the entire flow, create meaningful patterns and messages for error and kick-out scenarios. Even though, I have been involved in almost each phase of the project, here are some samples of the concepts I contributed as a Salesforce CRM and Lightning platform expert:

Option 4: CRM Workflow, Quote Flow

Option 4: CRM Workflow, Payment Summary

Product Selection Concept

Product Cart At a Glance

Release 2 and Release 3: Information Architecture and Ideations

Product Cart: Multi-Line Product Checkout Experience Architecture

Product Cart: Single Product Checkout Experience Architecture

Confirmation + Onboarding Page concepts

Google Sites

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