Problem

It takes up to 9 months to onboard a high volume integrated supplier and start transacting on the network. In that time there is high churn rate and a loss of potential revenue while the supplier is not transacting on the network.

Too much time is spent manually onboarding the supplier, dealing with support queries and reminding the supplier and their buyer to complete outstanding tasks.
 

My Role & Team

Leading the strategy and end-to-end design of the new supplier onboarding platform within a cross-functional team of a product manager, business analyst, solution architect, UI designer, and project manager. Using various design thinking methods and principles to help guide and define the product design strategy, better understand our customer pain points, and build a product focused on key user outcomes. Be the voice of the customer and envaglise UX best practices within the team and across the organisation.
 

Design Principals

Empathise
Understanding the business goals and what success looks like for stakeholders. Interviewing users to understand their jobs to be done, where they are struggling, and where Tungsten can add value.

Ideate
Mapping out the various user journeys with pains and gains.
Identifying key user outcomes to ideate and build low fidelity wireframes during internal workshops. 

Build, Measure & Learn
Creating hi-fidelity wireframes using a design library for consistency. Recruiting users to gather feedback and validating the design before creating epics/stories to be picked for development.
 

Building Empathy

Together with the sales and implementation team, we identified key users and users currently struggling to onboard. I then interviewed our customers to understand them better to build our personas and empathy maps highlighting their biggest pain points during onboarding and what success looks like to them. I then presented these personas back to business to help build a common understanding of our customers and what we need to focus on during ideation.

Some of the main pain points were not having visibility of the process and relying on email communications which delayed the process. The time taken to create the test file took too long as the amount of documentation was overwhelming to them, and too much back and forth between the customer, supplier, project manager and implementation team.

Customer Journey Map

While mapping the customer journey I was able to highlight parts the journey where the customer was struggling.

• Questionnaire - Some parts of the implementation require a more technical person to assist with the set-up instead of the account owner
• Creating the test file - Documentation was overwhelming and caused delays in customer sending their first invoice scenario
• Approval of PDF example - There are communication delays and too many errors on the final step of the implementation process

 

Product Vision Statement

For suppliers, who want to get paid better, the supplier connect portal is an onboarding platform, that allows suppliers to onboard on their own using an automated self service tool. Providing a faster way to get on the network as well as increasing visibility to both buyer and supplier. Unlike the current process which lacks automation and is prone to human error, our self service platform will remove manual processes, allowing suppliers to onboard as quickly as possible.

Getting suppliers on our network faster, with full visibility and improved communication between both buyer and supplier

Ideation

To develop the customer journey I facilitated workshops with key project stakeholders across the business. Using our personas and 'How might we questions' to collaboratively brainstorm and wireframe ideas to help visualise the solution and features which will help onboard customers fast and start transacting.

eg: How might we help supplier complete their implementation within timelines?

• Priming the user by showing the key steps and what they need to do
• Highlight the value of joining the network on the first login/registration screen
• Clear signposting and countdown clock to keep the user engaged and complete the steps quicker
• Allow the customer to easily pick up where they left off with a dashboard of steps completed, activity log and dates/times to complete the next steps
• Allow live chat between buyer and supplier to resolve issues quicker

Storyboarding

Storyboards were developed to easily understand the flow of our customer interaction with the product, giving everyone on the project a clear sense of what’s important for users and where we could add innovation when looking for further improvements.

Task Flow Diagrams

Mapping out the user journey for each persona and all the touchpoints and required UIs after full analysis. Task flow helped to show all the screens required and how they fit within the happy and unhappy customer paths.

Prototyping,Testing & Iteration

The last phase would be iterating on lo-fi wireframes with the team, presenting back to stakeholders and customers for further feedback before building hi-fi wireframes with the UI designer. During this phase, we presented final UIs for the last round of customer feedback before handing it over for development. Customers agreed that the new process and designs are a big improvement over the current offline process and had also suggested several improvements which we considered and highlighted to include in the final designs.

Customer Feedback (Positive)
"Process is a lot simplier, best to do it online. I can login and see were I am at and what needs to be done"
"Big improvement, self service is the way forward"
"I can see the minimum requirements to create an invoice file, within hours I can create a test file"

Action points based on feedback

• Allow for exporting of data and images for presentations
• Show start dates and ETA of when they will finish their implemantation
• Explain why fields are mandatory, which are country or customer compliant
• Customer asking to input too many requirements so need to add a query button on certain mandatory fields
• Supplier would like to notify the customer if they are having issues using livechat communication
   

Supplier reporting tool for accounts payable department to monitor supplier onboarding:

Supplier Onboarding Portal

 

Pattern library for developers to easily build components and maintain consistency

 

Challenges & Next Steps

One of the biggest challenges was uncovering manual back-office processes which needed to be understood, scoped, and digitised. This took a lot of extra time and effort but was necessary to improve the end-user experience, solve key pain points and align with business goals to fully automate the onboarding process. Another challenge was educating stakeholders to follow more agile and user-focused processes, by gathering user feedaback and presenting research insights we helped to remove bias and keep them involved along the journey. They see that a lack of research would also mean risks of doing re-work later on. Once the demonstrable product has been developed it will be released to a small number of customers to test, allowing us to present a minimal piloted project to gather more data and insights before a full release to all customers.

To measure success of the beta I defined the following customer and business success metrics according to Google's heart framework:

1. Task Success

• User finished their tasks easily and successfully
• Reduce time on each step

2. Operation Improvements

• Customer managed to complete task on their own with minimal assistance
• Reduce the time spent by the supplier between starting their implementation and sending their first invoice
• Reduce the time spent by support and implementation staff supporting customer onboarding

3. Retention

• Customer completed end goal
• Increase the number of transactions on the network

4. Customer Satisfaction

• Customer finds the app easy to use and helpful
• Improve supplier satisfaction (NPS) and goal completion rates

 

Outcomes

After a succesful beta we have launched the product to all customers

• On average customers were able to complete their integration in 51 days, which was a reduction of 40% compared to the initial target of 90 days.
• Customers enjoyed the expereince and felt self service is the way to go
• Implementation agents noticed higher engagement rates and urgency from the supplier to complete their integraiton

During beta we identified key product enhancements based on user feedback and analysis of our KPIs which included the following:

• Not enough steps are automated and require manual processes which are prone to error and delays
• Master map documentation could be further improved to make changes easier for the supplier
• Allowing Custom Map option to the journey to reduce the changes to the supplier ERP and onboard even faster
• Allowing sales to upsell current Web Form to start the self-service journey

Updated "As is" Journey

 

Adding Custom Map to the journey

Mapping out the future customer journey and story mapping the fuctional requirements, helping to build alignment within the cross functional team and visualise key requirements.