Online Ordering
Optimizing workflow efficiency for salespeople to onboard new customers.
Problem statement
The customer onboarding process took over three days to complete, requiring salespeople to navigate multiple platforms and overcome numerous bottlenecks—many of which depended on a single person for approval. As a result, work for new customers couldn’t begin immediately, delaying service resolution for urgent issues. This created a frustrating experience for both customers and the sales teams, hindering trust-building at a critical stage in the relationship.
User interviews
Spoke with members from over 5 teams to figure out what their day-to-day processes looked like, and to get a clear understanding of the current state of onboarding a new customer.
Service blueprint
After synthesizing the interview data, I mapped out the current state user experience which made the users’ pain points glaringly evident. The process to onboard a new customer took upwards of 40 steps, and relied on multiple unnecessary single points of failure. It also forced users to navigate between many different platforms and manually re-enter the same information in those various places — a recipe for human error.
Solution exploration
After understanding the key pain points and general desired path forward, I began to ideate on a simpler solution. One that would allow users to do their jobs more efficiently, and that could cut out duplicated work.
My product partner and I ran a series of usability tests followed by rapid iteration with our early ideas to quickly gather feedback from users. We found that most of the initial concepts we were trying were really well liked by our users, and were met with excitement. We were hearing things like “when can we start using this” and “this will make our lives so much easier.” But, we also learned through these tests, that our users are very set in their current processes and mindsets, and were asking questions about how the new experience would tie back in with their current ways of working.
We began looking at this process from a new perspective; the end goal of quickly onboarding a customer truly was so that a first work order could be placed for that customer. In realizing this, we felt it made the most sense to completely combine the “onboarding” of a new customer with the placement of their first order. Capturing and automating all necessary information to create a customer record in our system, while also successfully placing that first order became our focus.
Comparative and competitive analysis
We knew we wanted this onboarding process to work for both salespeople in the short term, but also for end customers themselves in the near future. So, we began to look at how order placement was happening at other companies.
The solution
After much consideration, we chose to employ wizard UX in the ordering experience, taking users through a short series of questions that, when completed, results in the creation of a work order.