Re-imagining the B2B eCommerce experience
Project background
This project was part of a gigantic company strategy change that wanted to bring an Enterprise product offering to the low-mid market world, re-thinking and re-designing the entire product offering, from sales to implementation, changing not only that way we were positioning our selves in the market but also refreshing and old and cumbersome platform.
The eCommerce offering wasn’t the biggest revenue maker for the company, but if we wanted to expand to those emerging companies, we needed to do way better than what we had.
My main responsibilities as UX Lead and design strategist
Defining the product offering strategy in collaboration with sales, engineering and product.
Planning all project phases together the Lead PM and Engineer.
Driving and shaping the design solution. Managing and distributing tasks among 4 designers
Preparing and facilitating design sprints.
Stakeholder presentation and design alignment with other product areas.
Hands on research. We didn’t have a dedicated researcher so I had to plan research activities, recruit users, prepare sessions, run interviews and several activities, analyse findings and provide insights to the respective teams.
Setting the stage
We weren’t starting from a blank cavas, we already had an eCommerce product directed to small medium companies but it wasn’t performing as expected, sales were low, complains were increasing and time to market was extremely slow. So what was the problem with our current product?
“Our vision states that our eCommerce offering is a business user friendly solution that lets our Company’s business users leverage the power of our integrated system to grow their online revenue.
We are not there yet.”
Business problems
Lost Sales due to:
No personalised demos. Point-of-sale challenges when customers weren’t able to fully understand the product offering value.
Length of time to Go Live (minimum 30 days on average 60 days)
It didn’t compare to the ease-of-use as competitive solutions
Expensive maintenance
Required a team of trained consultants to implement.
Too much time spent on set up tasks
Lost time that they could be spending on providing business consulting
Maintaining lengthy documentation
Costly to maintain & manage the web store (many siloed teams)
Low ratings
Low CSAT and NPS scores.
Getting to know our product and our users
Ok, so we knew what was wrong with some aspects of the product, but we didn’t know why those where happening, who was being affected and how. And it wasn’t easy to uncover all of the problems that were effecting the product performance and the customers and consultants’ satisfaction with it. We had to reconstruct the story from a disjointed and misaligned organisation.
To better understand the existing product gaps and our users’s needs and pain points, we started building relationships with other areas of the organisation (outside product), to learn from them and build trust over time. During that process, we performed a substantial amount of SMEs interviews (Suite Success, Sales, Customer Success), Consultant’s 1:1 interviews, reviewed previous related researches, performed several implementation observation sessions (both internal and external) and analysed long spreadsheets with customer issues.
Those sessions helped us to:
Better understand our product strengths and weaknesses
Discover, understand and empathise with our main personas
Uncover unmet user needs
The image above represents some of the activities that we performed during the initial project phase. We called this visualisation Process Map and we used it as a talk track with stakeholders to keep them informed about our progress, findings and next steps.
Who were our main personas?
We talked to and observe with two old suspects: Mike, the marketing manager and Phil, the web store manager. But during our research we identified someone new, someone from a low-mid market company that wanted to expand their business by using our new eCommerce offering, we called this profile Jack "of all trades".
Our secondary persona, the one performing most of the eCommerce tasks, was Claire, the Consultant.
“30 days doesn’t include our prep?? This will be a ton of work!”
“I am the customer’s best friend and teacher for 30 days.”
What were their main frustrations with our product?
The web store setup was so complex, counterintuitive and time consuming that we needed a trained consultant to perform setup for customers over an average of 60 days.
Customers purchased the solution and had an expectation to begin immediately but they had to wait in a queue until a consultant is ready to support them during the process.
Besides setting up the web store, consultants also needed to manage frequent bugs and challenges in the product.
Customers and consultants spent many hours on conference calls to walk through every configuration step to ensure everything was been addressed. Most often, the customer couldn’t recall where a configuration is located to make a change later.
During implementation, both customers and their consultant often felt frustrated and mistrusted the system.
At the end of Phase 1 of the implementation process, customers often felt abandoned, unprepared, and disappointed before ever using the ecommerce product.
How did that look like?
High-level summary of the major pain points experienced during the eCommerce web store implementation, both the customer and the consultant.
The eCommerce experience overhaul
How might we design a simplified intuitive experience that empowers customers to prepare their data, setup and manage their own personalised web store with confidence, guidance, and delight?
We wanted to build a web store setup & management solution that was able to:
Improve product sales success compares well to experiences offered by competitors
Decrease site setup time significantly
Delight users and drive customer satisfaction (improved CSAT, NPS and reduce churn)
Improve the eCommerce business user experience (easy to understand for non-technical users, while still supporting advanced users)
We started by proposing an entire new implementation experience. Well…actually we proposed to completely remove it making it easy enough for to provide a self service software.
Proposed journey - V1
One of the first things we proposed to do, was to bring that web store enablement before the customer readiness phase, so that customer could prepare their data with the context of a site.
By offering data prep, the trainings and some basic setup in context we were able to mitigate one the biggest customer pain points. We merged those steps into a new stage called Basic website setup & customisation, where the customer would be able to set up their web store at their own pace, using their own data and having a visual preview of their actions.
However, the license purchase could still be a blocker for some small/mid companies. So we decided to move it after the Basic website setup & customisation.
Proposed journey - V2
Surpassingly, we got executive approval and the trial ability became a stage in the process where customer could:
Enable the web store free of charge
Access a basic setup and customisation, importing their own data while learning how to use the tool
Ability to pitch end to end web store journey with a Trial License
Chose the license purchase phase at their convenience, having a real store with no commitment.
The trial option allowed us to remove pressure from small businesses to purchase the license while align with competitors’ offerings.
Consultants could then focus on the “real consulting”.
The product vision
This design proposal was the result of a Design Sprint, actually the first design sprint ever done in the company. But this post is getting to long already, so I’ll tell you more about that in this article.
Addressing the customer needs
Customisation. Use their own data to test the store from minute 1 on the installation. Trial account is connected with the rest of the ERP. Make changes at any moment in time (changing Theme for example)
Safety and trust. Providing autosave, drafts and constant previews
Workload and time. Simplifying data import and offering a more complete start account with place holders that educate and train the users. Customer have the freedom to setup and manage at their own pace, managing their own time. They will ultimately reduce consultant time during implementation and customization phase
Prepared and informed. They will be more knowledge about the product itself + having better and more specific questions about what they need
Guide and support. Guided steps all they way, not just during setup
Kudos from leadership
First I wanted to say that the vision and the approach, the principles and the thoughts that went into this where spot on, amazing, super exciting, so really really good work that was done by the entire team. I thinks this is a REALLY big step forward into exactly the right direction.
This is basically a really important alignment and a really important step so, it’s hard to get there, it’s really difficult to get this alignment and put together this vision and think outside the box. And I think you guys accomplished that and did a really really good job.
Vision approach AMAZING, fantastic work! Really really well done.
Engineering GVP
TEAM! this is an outstanding example of collaboration on top of fantastic design work and message delivery. I get emotional when I see design moving people’s hearts. So much can be triggered when we put this sort of approach out there. This is design magic! And we need more and more of this. I feel proud of you all. And I mean designers and non-designers. It’s just the beginning but a pretty strong one. Hats off! ❤️
UX Director
