Case Study
    UX Audit

Legacy Pre-sales Portal Overhaul for Telecom Market Expansion

Background

Our client is a Cloud-based Communications Provider serving thousands of businesses in North America, providing custom-built Managed Connectivity and Cloud Communications solutions by partnering with over 20 major network providers. Looking to penetrate into the South American markets.

The company wanted to scale up and refine its sales portal to sustain the proposed expansion.

Current Process

The Agents were –

  • Part of the sales team
  • Responsible for connecting with businesses 
  • Understanding varied business requirements

Agents made use of the sales portal to –

  • Document those business requirements
  • Manage and build quotes as per requirements
  • Have them reviewed internally
  • Share the final quotation with the prospect

Their incentives would be aligned along with the health of their pipelines and stages in which different quotes were in.

Legacy Pre-sales

Challenges

As the business was looking to scale it was important that they acknowledge the challenges that were beginning to impact the inflow of new customers and deals by fixing these challenges. 

For the Agents 

  • Difficult to use
  • Misaligned workflows 
  • Lack of process monitoring 
  • Poor usability demotivated their Agents 

For the Business

  • Reduced accountability for lead tracking
  • No tracking available for active deals 
  • Trends and market needs would show up with a delay
  • Poor usability led to poor service
Legacy Pre-sales

Problem Statement

Inconsistencies in the quote creation and management workflows within the sales portal were hindering service deliveries; resulting in a roadblock to the proposed expansion of the business.

A UX overhaul of the sales portal would ensure that the new customers experience consistent and seamless quality of service across every touchpoint.

UX Strategy

Telecom companies are often guilty of assuming that the client experience is a compilation of independent touchpoints. That customer service, sales progress, and promotional materials are somehow unrelated to each other.

On the contrary, the client is the focal point of all activities. The product journey and the customer experience are essentially two sides of the same coin.

UX Strategy

User-centric design allows telecom companies to map the entire client journey and gain an in-depth understanding of what their users actually want and deliver a refined user experience. To do this well, it is important to –

  • Identify the user journeys that matter most to key segments
  • Map these journeys to understand their flow across functions, channels, and devices
  • Identify and resolve the biggest pain points

Ensuring Success 

  1. Stakeholder Buy-In: The sales process involved multiple stakeholders across sales, access management, finance, procurement, legal and so from different business units. In order to make an impactful shift, it was important that Koru was able to ensure their participation. 
  2. Definition of Scope and Milestones: There is a fine alignment between the vision of the business and what the product teams are capable of delivering. Koru’s role was to act as a mediator between both and design goals in a way that aligned with the interests and capabilities of both.
  3. Technology: Our customer had scaled their product ecosystem and built their internal capabilities around them. Koru’s role was to actively work with the product team and make a case as possible to help leverage the capabilities of existing technology, off-the-shelf solutions, and new technology that enabled them to deliver better experiences and scale in the future.
  4. Experience to the end customer: Being a service-based company, the value delivered to the end customer was key. The business wanted to ensure that the engagement helped them establish a product and process-driven approach to delivering the end value than diverting that responsibility solely to human touchpoints wherever appropriate.

Process

UX Audit

  • One-on-one interviews were conducted with stakeholders across departments to understand the process and see how they leverage the tool in their day-to-day process. This identified specific areas where they struggled with the process or the system.
  • Planned and conducted cross-functional workshops to help stakeholders define the process from their perspective. This also allowed them to build empathy and share the vision of the business.
  • Focused on areas where the processes were offline and had excessive reliance on an individual and team-driven process.
  • We began by assessing the data to understand the users and the nature of their needs from the system. We broke them down further by different milestones in the sales process where they would engage digitally.
  • The research helped us establish:
    • The   process and the areas where they were aided by the existing ecosystem
    • Users’ expectations, potential, and capabilities
    • Overlaps, areas which lacked accountability, and confusing ownerships
    • Product and workflow-specific challenges encountered by the users in their day-to-day interaction with the process and system.

Key highlights from the UX Audit 

  1. Misalignment of the existing portal’s product workflows with that of the business.
  2. Switching between multiple online and offline tools were costing productivity, error-prone data entry and confusion.
  3. Usability issues and challenges made the portal difficult to use for new as well as legacy users.
UX Audit 

For the Business & Users 

  1. Align the solution to integrate with the actual journey of the process
  2. Increase visibility and tracking for stakeholders
  3. Help involved stakeholders view and gauge what’s coming their way
  4. Enable the business to easily gauge customer trends, and planning and packaging of services
  5. Easier integration with other tools within the ecosystem, such as the CRM

For the Product and its Usability 

  1. Make the workflows intuitive for the users
  2. Ensure retained as well as new workflows reflect a consistent experience
  3. Ease in the documentation of requirements, and accuracy, especially in areas where the data was manually documented.
  4. Engage a standardized design system that made it easy to scale the product
  5. Institutionalize the product usage experience to set guidelines

Ideation

We chose specific areas for enhancements considering the workflow-specific challenges and proposed features that make for a standardized product experience.

Ideation

Usability Testing Report

Usability Testing Report

Design

Transforming the wireframes and prototypes to actual images with themes, components, and styles applied to them.

UX Design
Quote creation portal
Add new Location
UI Design
UI Design
UI Design
UI Design

Impact

The redesign resulted in

Effective management of the work processes

Increased data accuracy and process integration

Increased accountability and transparency

Faster decision-making

Easy to understand reports that made the trends accessible.

Increase in productivity by 32% for agents (Measured through time comparison of key workflows between old and new solutions)

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