I teamed with three designers to identify enterprise experience opportunities in a company that provides customized battery solutions. Sponsored by Oracle, we proposed a CRM solution that integrates information sources and simplifies workflows through automation.
Aiming to design solutions beyond personal experiences, our team reached out and connected with a company to collaborate with us to identify opportunities in enterprise workflow.
Located in Fremont, CA, the company has been providing customized battery solutions to a wide range of customers for decades. It works closely with customers to develop battery, chargers, and other power products.
The company thrives on responding to customer needs efficiently. As the business continues to grow, managing product requirements become a more difficult endeavor.
Through conversing with Hannah and Brian, we learned that the salespeople are responsible for maintaining product requirement documents (PRD) that each project evolves around throughout its life cycle. In each iteration, salespeople have to discuss with customers, PM, and engineering team.
From the initial conversation, we identified two problems that affect the efficiency of project completion.
The lack of alignment on customer needs affects battery performance and delays shipment.
Some customers give wrong information due to the lack of knowledge for anticipating battery performance. Salespeople and engineering team also don’t always fully anticipate the factors that influence battery performance.
It's hard for sales to collect real requirements from customers. A lot of customers may say they want something operating at 85 degrees max., but we need to ask for more specific information. If the salesperson doesn't know how to collect the information or if the potential customer don't know how to tell their real needs, there would be become a miscommunication.
Scattered information across different teams and platforms prevents salespeople from managing customer requirements efficiently.
Currently, the PRD is originated from customer requirements in email, attached to the opportunity in NetSuite CRM, and managed in a Word document as the email conversations evolve.
It’s non-value added work. I don’t think our salespeople should put these information in one by one. It’s very time consuming, and more importantly, there will be mistakes.
Working with customers, you can have five to ten, even more people that you’re dealing with at any given time. Our days are quite busy, we have to organize what’s the priority every hour.
We decided to focus on the first problem after confirming with Hannah that delay of shipment has greater impact on the current business.
How might we surface insightful information to help customers and salespeople align on project expectations and requirements?
To better anticipate battery performance, we aimed to explore design opportunities utilizing machine learning to surface insights based on past trends, including quote details, product specifications, battery spec, use cases, text results, etc.
To make the best use of time between weekly check-ins with Hannah and Brian, we decided to brainstorm concepts and use concept testing to better understand the problem space and prioritize design direction.
We organized the ideas into different stages in the project, evaluated the benefit of each concept, and prioritized the ones with higher impact and reasonable feasibility.
In our check-in, we shared our simplified service blueprint with three concepts with the client.
By adding a chatbot that confirms specs, asks additional questions, and gives immediate quote into the proposal form, the system sets early customer expectations and lays foundation to kick-start customer-salesperson conversation.
The chatbot is useful in spotting obvious mistakes (i.e. unrealistic values.) The quote estimate isn't meaningful, since most customers are not 100% sure about the battery specs, and the quote could change very dramatically as the project develops.
By asking initial questions before handling to the salesperson and comparing the project with past orders, the chatbot enables salesperson to ask more meaningful questions and ensure that past mistakes will not be repeated.
The system equipped the salesperson with knowledge about the battery performance to avoid obvious mistakes and unnecessary communication with the engineering team, but isn't helpful when the customers don't express their needs clearly.
In reality, the latter case happens much more frequently. Many customers ask for quote before the engineering details are confirmed, presumably due to tight deadlines. The salespeople are left with no option but to wait for updates before the conversation continues.
By suggesting multiple samples for testing, the system increase probability of successful performance and mitigate back-and-forth communication.
It is better to get it right the first time to stay efficient and outrun competitors within the short time. Offering multiple options also appear to be less confident and isn't the company's style, when building relationship is critical for the business growth.
We realized that the problem isn't about understanding customer requirements when the specs aren't perfectly defined by customers themselves when they reach out.
While it was an impactful problem space, much more time and effort is needed to reach a purposeful solution. To better leverage our existing resources, we thought: can we help the company make existing workflow more efficient and respond to customer changes more quickly?
We turned to the second problem identified:
Scattered information across different teams and platforms prevents salespeople from managing customer requirements efficiently.
In the existing CRM solution, the time and effort spent in unnecessary labor impedes salespeople’s productivity and directly impacts the business.
How might we provide a timely and comprehensive view of customer requirements for all departments?
We evaluated the features and plugins in the prominent CRM products in the market, including Salesforce and NetSuite CRM – currently used by our client.
While both products offer integrations to store relevant information at one place, there is little synergy between information sources. We aimed to introduce automation to today's workflow to reduce the amount of manual labor.
When brainstorming ways to introduce automation to the workflow, we aimed to empower the employees by providing control and transparency, instead of replacing their roles and contribution.
We organized our ideas based on the problematic moments addressed. Next, we prioritized the concepts based on the amount of impact and time saved, and examined how they could exist cohesively throughout the workflow.
We shared four opportunity moments in the experience journey and low-fidelity sketches in our next check-in.
By generating customer account automatically from the opportunity, the system saves the salesperson's time copying and pasting information, and helps customer manages their orders more quickly.
It is more worthy to help salespeople generate opportunities than customer accounts. It takes more time to copy and paste information to create opportunities, since they usually arrive as unstructured information, such as plain text in emails or PDFs.
By generating PRD automatically based on opportunity information, the system saves the salesperson's time copying and pasting information and avoids human errors.
The feature is useful if it works perfectly. For each opportunity, the salesperson will spend 5-10 minutes filling the form based on the email received. It is essential to keep options to manual edit the form.
By generating talking points and reply prompts from the missing items in the PRD, the system helps salespersons prepare faster for the follow-up conversation.
The feature sounds very useful, especially displaying missing items by the side of the call, since a lot of times the conversations go off tangent.
By updating PRD automatically based on the conversation, the system the system saves the salesperson's time and avoids human errors.
The feature is useful if it works perfectly. The salespeople could concentrate on the conversation and take fewer notes.
Based on the feedback, we iterated our concepts focusing on:
Though we didn't put emphasis on brand identity, I created high-fidelity prototypes as proof of concept. We aimed to accompany the intelligence of automation with succinct and distilled visual design to differentiate ourselves from other enterprise software.
It is essential to connect opportunities closely to product development status. By changing the format of product requirement document (PRD) from a word document to a living structured product definition, we believe that the system can avoid input errors and unlock potential insights from existing data.
By integrating the CRM tool with other platforms, we believe that the system can recognize opportunities for automated actions.
When a salesperson receives an opportunity as unstructured information, such as a forwarded email, the email plugin recognizes it as a potential opportunity and suggests to import.
Coordial recognizes the information in the email attachment and automatically generates a PRD. The salesperson can review all the fields before approving the changes.
Before the salesperson has the follow-up conversation with customer, Coordial suggests talking points by displaying the missing items in the PRD.
In the call, based on the conversation, Coordial suggests updates to the PRD in real-time.
After the manager approves the opportunity to move forward, the information would be immediately available to the engineering team, so that all of them can communicate around the single source of truth.
Whenever customers change their requirements, the salesperson can update the document immediately in the email, or open in Coordial and mark it as an issue to discuss with the team later.
We shared our findings and solution proposal with Oracle Design team at their SF office.
I'm very happy that we got to design for real-world problems in the enterprise space. I learned to adapt and pivot fast even if though the first problem we located didn't fit the scope of the project.
If there were more time, I would like to refine the detailed experience by conducting heuristic analysis of competitor products and usability testing.