Sales Cadence

The Problem

It was getting harder for an agent to track call lists across multiple tools now that interaction channels such as social media, SMS, and web chat were added their calls.

Omnichannel is changing the contact center landscape by putting the power in the customer's hands of how they want to be contacted. To meet the challenge with the software at the time, more opened windows would clutter the agent's computer screen, thus leaving the potential for losing track of leads. We wanted to streamline the process in one place that could leverage Salesforce call activity and notes.

My Role

I was User Researcher, Lead UX Designer, and responsible for product strategy.

I collaborated with the Product Manager and Technology Lead on a product strategy that would reduce potential risks. The PM had conducted all user interviews so he provided me with user research, notes, and written scenarios. The data helped me create personalized storyboards, user flows, and wireframes denoting the ideal user interactions.

I sought user feedback from internal stakeholders before handing off the deliverables to our Senior UI Designer to complete the pixel-perfect visual design and Product Designer to build the prototype in Invision. The PM and I used the prototypes to run usability tests with internal users onsite.

Product Constraints

A product to use as a base was purchased yet failed to work with our code. This meant the whole product had to be built from the back-end up.

In addition to creating the base, Newvoicemedia was just acquired by Vonage and the product focus was on implementing their brand design system in all the software plus undergo a full redesign all with a deadline of Dreamforce 2020.

Understanding the User

Interviews with call center managers showed us John the supervisor should be assigned the primary user and the sales agent Lucy as a secondary.

A supervisor would need to step in when an agent is sick, there are too many lists, or when there aren't enough agents to complete all call lists. Prior to this project, the proto-personas I created gave us a good understanding of base agent and supervisor needs.

Using the personas I wrote up "day in the life" stories complete with storyboards created in Balsamiq. The PM and I learned not all the sales reps want an automated process to make life easier. For some it's more helpful to be able to customize the steps as needed and create their own shortcuts in the tool they choose to use.

Breaking Down the UX Design Process

This project focused on crafting a user-centered experience that would be intuitive and seamlessly integrated with Salesforce. The UX design process was based on user-centered design steps of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and testing.

Empathize

The PM gathered customer feedback from onsite observations and interviews. Despite the time zone difference I made myself available to attend 7 interviews using the remote meeting tool Zoom. These meetings gave us insights into what problems sales cadence should be solving and to define what success is. This list of problems, or use cases, were then separated by pages.

Define

I took the PM's research notes and written scenarios created storyboards and user flows to gain understanding of which problems should be prioritized to solve, before jumping into solution findings. With these storyboards in hand I moderated remote user interviews to get insights on how accurate our findings were. They were spot on so the project progressed.

Ideate

More detailed wireframes were requested by the UI Designer, as the storyboards were too abstract to be used to create static visuals.

Prototype

Final designs were done by the Senior UI Designer and prototypes finsihed by another Senior UI/UX Designer.

Test

I setup, moderated, and recorded usability testing with 5 internal sales reps performing main CRUD actions. Then created video recording snippets to demonstrate to the engineers how our user interacts with sales cadence.

Lessons Learned

User testing results showed we had the right problems however the solution was still too basic to be useful.

Since it started with a prebuilt solution, it was found the design choices were more based on how to fit in that existing solution rather than on what the user actually needed or wanted. The user testing showed us that the solution wasn't quite fully fleshed out and should be redesigned to take into account the feedback.

These insights showed us the desired solution should be a simple API that keeps track in a calendar application of the sales reps' choice. Also providing a dashboard where all their assigned lists are ready to start calling on. Also that same API would be able to customize emails in their own application and perform bulk emailing.