— CLIENT
Academic Work (Akind)
— ROLE
UX designer
— DATE
2021-2022
Summary
Late 2021, I jumped on the journey the company was facing, exchanging their old internal applications for new ones that would better suit their vision and empower their employees and customers.
I led the design of the account managers sales experience managing potential clients and existing clients.
With clear business goals, deep understanding and empathy for our users we went from unstructured, outdated company information and tedious time-consuming ways of working taking focus from what actually matters to provide a CRM where they found available companies and potential clients 83% faster than before, increased client satisfaction with more than 30% by, for instance, being able to be more professional and relevant. Lastly, they had more time to plan and execute their tasks effectively which went from 40% of their time to nearly 80% which naturally leads to stronger client relationships.
The manageable chaos..or?
Success is the surface
We are at the forefront of the staffing and recruitment industry within our niche, with awards such as the most satisfied clients of the year and the highest turnover in our sector. However, when we flipped the coin we saw another reality:
• The number of lost deals are high
• A far to large percentage of newly recruited salespeople leave the company within 6 months
- The fact that we manage to deliver despite these not so fun numbers makes us ask ourselves the question "why"? How is it that our sellers succeed in some cases and not in others? This is where I come in, with my humble opinion, my greatest contribution.
- The hidden currents
Regardless of whether you are going to a job interview or buying a product, an overall image of the company or the product is essential. As a new or seasoned seller, it is exactly the same. Our sellers have found their own ways to solve this as we do not contribute updated relevant information.
Furthermore, without a customer database users could create their own which contributed to another problem:
Imagine being in a conversation with a possible customer when you learn that the colleague is already working with the customer.
What impression do you get when you are in a well-known restaurant, which creates a certain expectation, and one waiter asks if you want something to drink and you order a glass of wine and a few minutes later another waiter comes and asks again? Not the best, right?
We all know that a good first impression is important. After that comes building or maintenance of relationships and that means various efforts such as conversations, meetings and email sending. It becomes difficult when there is no solid way of doing it, so even this is done in different ways and without clear prioritisation and structure, you may just have missed the biggest deal of your life! Meaning, with such an administrative workload at the same time it clearly is a lot to handle.
An account managers day to day
Below is a picture of a part of the account manager sales journey, created from several interviews and observations done with the team and stakeholders. Different applications are used for the steps from finding a potential client to performing a meeting. The “C” icon is the current sales system.
The amount of apps and clouds… 😮💨
"It is like a registration system where I add what I have done to meet my KPI:s"
Time to break down the big bang
Capability mapping as a strategic and prioritisation tool
A new CRM tool was like stumbling upon something as big as a mammoth. So, together with our stakeholders, we broke it down to smaller chunks to be able to see the whole picture. The chunks being the capabilities that we discussed and prioritised. For example “perform meeting” or “perform call” went under the category “Optimise and contact clients”.
This way of approaching the big animal was absolutely perfect for us as a recurrent communication tool and for us to decide which were the core capabilities from a business and users point of view. Let ut say, adding a star next to “import company data” is far from just a gut feeling. Last but not least, way easier for me to design knowing what our users should be able to do in the first version 🙌
Keeping empathy for our users
Beyond functionality and new super CRM, I believe in empathy and understanding of the user's needs which is also the basis of a good vision. And to the frustration of us designers, reports or longer summaries from research results tend to get dusty in a folder somewhere after being presented. So, from research we designed three personas that would represent our sales people and that we went back to when designing flows and making various design decisions.
How did they affect design?
It helped us understand both the similarities and the differences between them.
Everyone had the same work tasks but some worked more with certain areas than others.
Junior account managers had a rough first year and the part where they need to find available companies and contacts was a huge pain point we decided to put lot of our efforts there.
Another need they all had in common was an effective way of prioritising their work and a clear overview of what’s going on and what is next.
We were all on the same boat on what needed to be done!
As you can see I'm a huge fan of user journeys. Here I made one where we removed the clouds and changed them for opportunities/suggestions.
Setting up the key flows
Scope
To further clarify, we designed for the sales process from finding a potential client, call and perform a meeting. We integrated a client database enabling them to search for available companies and contacts and a way for them to handle their todo's. These two are one of the main designs that we believed would solve both user and business needs.
Iteration friendly start
Since we had time on our side, which is not always the reality, I started sketching on Balsamiq and continually iterated through it with the team and stakeholders.
It turned out to be a good way of setting a conceptual ground for the essential flows that needed to be in the system.
After several user testing rounds, informing and involving the whole team in new decisions we proceeded further to refining the key flows.
The first round of user testing were done on five people and they were all situated in Stockholm. The flow was from calling a contact to adding a business opportunity. The second round was on the prospecting flow, where the user tries to find an available company/contact.
This is a snapshot of the task manager view
in an expanded version
The third round was the widest one of them all and was done with an already developed product which this above picture is from.
This time we tested it with five people from all six countries and the process from finding a company, call and perform a meeting. We wanted to discover if there were different needs such are cultural or language aspects.
Sharing the same mental model
While screens were adding up rapidly it made me realise the complexity to keep it all together and for us to have in mind how certain decisions for one step could affect the other. Our stakeholders were concerned about us not having the business goals in mind.
A sitemap was great to use to see if the hierarchy made sense and provide the team and stakeholders the ability to discuss what is relevant to have in the different views without them being distracted on things such as layout or how a button should look like.
A thoughtful delivery with big impact
From a product development point of view smaller releases is about minimising risks from a usability, technical and business perspective.
But equally as important for me is the impact we would make on our users day to day:
• They would have to use both systems, temporarily, but an uncertain period of time.
• With the new system functionality and process we expect them to plan their work more and add relevant information which could cause some frustration especially when we're not completely able to show them the value in the first release.
So I really wanted to make sure we remove all the clutter and have a clear intuitive experience which was possible with clear goals, research and testing.
Follow up plan
Secondly, handling the first release carefully with a follow up plan:
1. A PSSUQ survey to measure different aspects of usability
2. Feedback workshops & interviews
3. NPS survey
4. Continuous stakeholder meetings to agree on prioritisation & changes
We first started with a small focus group of five, then released to all Stockholm offices. There's never more of a "real deal" as when you release a product out in the users real environment but even though we took baby steps at first it went really fast to make changes which I believe was because we were not afraid to fail fast from the very beginning.
The more people we released to the more we could rely on data-driven research and get to the point where we could balance feedback and decisions for iterations while working on releasing the second part of the system.
Lastly but not least important, we wanted to make sure our users felt that they were heard and that we would be there to support them. This was a big change and we did not want them to feel alone.
Moment(s) of reflection
- There were two learnings that stood out a bit extra.
- 1. To maintain the balance between collecting relevant information for business, such as tracking meetings leading to business opportunities, and creating a sales tool for effective task management. For example the need for more precise business metrics made us, somewhere along the way, loose the user’s context which is that our salespeople are constantly on the move. In real life, not everything happens systematically. There’s a need for flexibility in planning, considering spontaneous events in a salesperson’s day.
2. To truly implement the personas in the development process. I felt it was hard to use in practice when we were looking at a problem at a certain use case.