CRM - Opportunity management
Client
Thoughtworks
Duration
8 months
Team size
25 - 30
Role
Lead Experience
designer / Service designer
Budget
~
What was the project about?
To make business process of opportunity management in Thoughtworks more efficient and to have a single system as source of truth for all demand / sales activities.
It was about improving this entire process
What Problem we were trying to solve ?
We did not have a good way to manage our our opportunities and our client information.
How did we get to know this ?
1. Periodical discovery sessions
2. Feedback, questions and complaints from many internal users of system
3. Through lost projects.
So did we solve the problem ?
Spoiler alert!... Yes we did!
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We successfully redesigned the process to reduce the response time for deal review process of opportunity from 15 or more days to 3 days.
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We also were able to eliminate manual tasks performed by some roles and brought system handled automation wherever it was feasible. This saved the company countless work hours by employees.
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We were also successful in proving the hypothesis of one single source of truth. We created a single system which helped us not only track opportunities but also keep a track of our connections with our clients. By cutting down on multiple tools and systems, In financial terms this helped us save more than $200000.
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we were able to identify pain points and intervention areas in the opportunity management process and redesign the entire process to make it more transparent and efficient for all roles.
A brief context to project
In the past, Thoughtworks had its own custom CRM (Salesfunnel) built on Salesforce platform. At that time, it was built specifically for having a better user experience in mobile devices, whilst keeping Salesforce as the backend. At the time, Salesforce did not have many functionalities and good experience for mobile devices
Salesfunnel had a basic opportunity management, but had no way to track relationships with clients. When we moved away from Salesforce, we used the lot of spreadsheets and lost a lot of connections. Important knowledge and relationships walked out of the door with every person that left Thoughtworks.
In a data driven world, we were falling behind!
We realized the need to improve this situation. To understand how and what all we can improve, we started with a Discovery session and workshop.
Project team
Lead UX designer / service designer
Senior visual designer
Business analysts ( 2 )
Tech lead
PM
PO
Delivery principle
UI dev ( ~ )
Back end dev ( 10 + )
How we did it ?
( process )
Understanding basics of the system & analyzing existing design
For example, what is opportunity, how it enters into Thoughtworks CRM system. Which roles and people play part in this process. How business is run with this.
Talking with Product owner and other stakeholders
Together with PO, we went over business vision and what OCMO ( office of Chief marketing officer ) wants from this. Before committing to scraping the existing CRM tool and going to Salesforce, Ocmo wanted to understand the feasibility, current pain points and need.
Through discovery, we were trying to understand
1. how things are working currently ?
2. what are the problems in current process ?
3. how can we improve it, and is it viable to do so?
Conducting discovery workshop with the team
We made a research plan and accordingly did the interviews. Whilst we did the user interviews and contextual inquiry, we also mapped the user's journey and involvement in the entire opportunity management process.
User research through user interviews and contextual inquiries
Why did we choose to do user interviews and contextual inquiry ?
One of the main reasons we chose user interviews and contextual inquiry was because we thought doing user interviews and contextual inquiries will help us understand our users and the work they do in the best way possible as compared to other research techniques.
Research analysis and presentation to team and stakeholders
Since there were multiple interviews to be conducted in the span of 4 weeks, I mentored 2 business analysts from the team in how to conduct interviews and took help from them.
When we finished the documentation of research. We used Dovetail to analyze the data and do affinity mapping.
Analyzing research and affinity mapping to derive and mapping personas
We used AI powered tool like dovetail to help us in analysis of research.
Mapping as is user journey for all personas.
Used Mural for this
After we presented the new opportunity management process to the business stakeholders, it was decided to approach this in phases. Some of the wireframes shown below are part of phase 1.
culminating pain points and identifying intervention areas.
Re-designing the opportunity management process
Mapping the to be journey for all personas in redesigned opportunity management process
Creating business case with team
This was a new learning for me, since many of the aspects in business case were much beyond a traditional XD responsibilities I had faced previously.
Creating migration roadmap and phase planning.
After the discovery session, the project went through an approval process with the business team and was approved for implementing in a phased manner. There were 3 phases
Primary tasks and task flows mapping. Re-design IA for opportunity section.
Designing wireframes
We also did an open card sorting exercise with users to understand on page level how users are grouping some fields and elements in that particular page so that we can utilize this data to improve our wirefames
We decided to do multiple iterations of usability tests. We used Figma prototype for testing
Usability testing
Refining wireframes based on the test findings
Visual design
User research & analysis
How many users we interviewed ?
Tools we used for research phase.
we did contextual inquiries for 45 users.
How did we come up with this sample size ?
We took an approach where we did not go ahead with fixed sample size at first. For every role, we interviewed users. After every interview, we documented and analyzed the data. We kept on interviewing till we found the data we were getting was repeating and very less new information is getting discovered.
For some roles we were also bound by the number automatically, for example, there were some roles where there were only 2 people worked as so we interviewed both of them.
We interviewed users from 7 different countries / offices and more than 10 roles
How did we recruit users ?
Since this was an internal application, we were able to utilize Thoughtworks internal people directory tool to find out people working in different roles in specific regions. We identified these users from there and then approached them via email or chat. Also, since PO was involved in the process and knew it well, she was able to direct us to key roles and people from different regions.
How we analyzed data collected
Interviews recorded on zoom and analyzed on Dovetail
The taxonomy for the tags used was created such, that it can be leveraged by any other researcher in future who is working on other internal applications of Thoughtworks. The aim here was to create a research and data repository which can be utilized by other designers who are working on Thoughtworks business and internal applications to understand different roles and personas.
Affinity mapping in dovetail
As is journey of each role and person mapped
We mapped as is journey for every user from every role and later overlapped all journeys together to get the high level view of entire system.
As is journey of each role and person mapped
We presented our findings of as is journey to Product owner and other stakeholders periodically.
Overlapping of all users journeys gave us a good understanding of how opportunity enters the Company's ecosystem and which roles play part in the process. with this we were able to refine the process and make it more efficient.
What did we find in research ?
Some of the painpoints which we discovered
No systematic way of managing and storing past client case studies
Client leadership team uses spreadsheets to track deal review.
No systematic way of managing and storing past client case studies
No systematic way of managing and storing past client case studies
No systematic way of managing and storing past client case studies
Lack the collaboration tool and visualize the process prior to deal review. teams dependent on different external tools like trello.
Crucial processes like deal review dependent on large volume email threads
Have lost customer / new opportunities because could not get back to customer with proposal sooner.
No guidance on discount threasholds or no access to updated rate cards.
Crucial processes like deal review dependent on large volume email threads
Some of the intervention opprtunities which we discovered
Deal review can be tracked and processed in the CRM system itself.
Some accounts do local level deal review which requires less turnaround time. this can be replicated in other regions ( to be explored )
Sales team can connect with pursuit team directly through CRM. CRM will have repository of available pursuit team people
Conversations about opportunity can be done in the CRM itself via gchat and sforce integration. so all the information will stay at one place
Automation with the help of system can be brought in tasks which are currently taking lot of manual efforts.
Automation / semi automation of deal review process
Automation initial of approval process
Persona mapping
Data gathered through research was analyzed and we were able to derive personas through it.
One of the challenges we faced in mapping personas was that there were many roles which had only 1 or 2 employees working in that role. Because of which, we could not make multiple personas for the single role.
Redesigned opportunity management
After we presented the data gathered through research to stakeholders. we designed the to be opportunity management process.
Due to sensitive nature of the process, only certain part of the entire process can be shown here
Wireframing and visual design
Tools used for wireframing and visual design
We kept progress and stage of opportunity upfront so that all roles can see it easily and act on it when needed. this was implemented based on the pain points we gathered in the research process.
Placed the most used and needed tools and information in the easily accessible viewed area.
Placed the contacts info for opportunity upfront and increased the total number of contacts which can be seen
To determine which field should be placed where, we conducted one short round of card sorting session with different roles. We got a great insight of, some fields being more used by particular roles than others. Based on this we did propose a role based customization in the design of interface. But due to the time required to achieve this, it was not taken as part of the phase 1 , 2 or 3
Before
We used existing modular components from Salesforce design system to reduce development time when it was possible.
After
Usability testing
Tools used for Usability testing
What did we find in Usability tests
We chose to do multiple rounds of Formative usability tests with the help of Figma prototypes. We recorded these sessions and further analyzed the recordings on dovetail and used that feedback to improve the design further.
Some important fields, which were Missing in opportunity detail screen and need to be added.
Starting in edit mode would save us more time when it comes to opportunity creation flow
There were some fields which were very important from the business perspective but users had hardly used those or didtnt event notice.
Learning and challenges in project.
Learning
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Using Dovetail to analyze and cluster the research data.
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Mentoring non design roles in design research and execution.
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facilitating research plan and discovery workshops
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Understanding how business operations and lead handling in a typical Digital consultancy organization. How client are contacted, how opportunities enter the system and what steps come in between till project ends.
Challenges
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One of the biggest challenges was that the team was not known to the different research methodologies and ways to Discover and mentoring them on the go on the ongoing research whilst keeping the mistakes in processes was challenging.
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After mentoring, some of the team members were navigating away from the original research plan to do their own impromptu research.
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Since this activity directly impacted the company business and revenue, there was a lot of pressure from higher management to finish the project in very less time. This also meant we had to do multiple showcase of same content to people of different level.
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In Usability tests when we asked users to 'think loud' while performing tasks. Some of the users took it as a sign to have conversation with us and started giving feedback about design as well.
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We had to rely on manual recordings and analysis before we got an approval of Dovetail. After we got approval for usage of dovetail, we had to re work on inserting the data of old interviews in dovetail
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