Background

After completing internal team interviews, we created a full system to help our CSMs manage our users and their companies.

  • UX Designer and Lead UX Researcher. 
I was responsible for starting research initiatives at Raiven--learn more.

    For this product, my primary responsibility was internal team research, user management pages, and linked companies pages.


    • UX Research

    • Data Synthesizing

    • Generative Research

    • A/B Research

    • Usability Testing

    • Research Reports

    • Affinity Diagramming

    • Creating Insights

    • Reporting to C-Suite Executives

    • Sitemapping

    • User Flows

    • Prototyping

    • Product Ideation and Iteration

    • Presentations on progress across various teams

  • Conduct 20 to 30 interviews by the end of the quarter to understand the needs of our CSMs to eliminate their pain points and remove any bottlenecks.

  • We performed a combination of generative research, qualitative, and quantitative--conducting 20 interviews in order to discover CMS’ pain points.

Implementing a centralized system architecture as a "source of truth" will streamline the user onboarding process by eliminating the need for manual data entry across multiple platforms (our internal app, Hubspot, Shopify).

This will significantly reduce onboarding time and enable self-service sign-ups, thereby improving customer experience and reducing reliance on customer success management (CSM) involvement.

Hypothesis

Business Problem

Our company was hindered by fragmented and inconsistent customer data dispersed across multiple platforms (app, HubSpot, Shopify). This fragmentation created inefficiencies in the onboarding process, requiring manual data entry and significant CSM involvement. As a result, new customer acquisition and activation were delayed, negatively impacting our overall business growth and customer satisfaction.

Business Question

How can we develop a system architecture as a central "source of truth" to streamline additional business processes, such as customer support, marketing, and sales, while ensuring seamless integration with our existing platforms (app, HubSpot, Shopify)?

The Outcome

Our initial hypothesis, based on the idea of an end-to-end system was validated by our internal team research.

  • CSMs have a highly manual and disparate process--having company information across multiple platforms (Our app, hubspot, Shopify) that was out of sync and not connected.

  • Our research revealed that not only do CSMs need a high level view of companies and branches, but need to be able to view more granular details like branches, users, lines of credit, and contracts signed with suppliers.

  • Recognizing this, we identified a potential to offer a complete system that onboarded users with little to no CSM involvement, at an instant.

Old CSM System

Our old system had just a single page dedicated to Customer Success Managers (CSMs). On this page, they were only able to add a new company (“user groups”), send marketing materials, add linked systems, view a list contracts, and deactivate users when necessary. However, CSMs faced limitations, as they couldn't remove users from the system, update contracts, or manage many other daily tasks that are essential for maintaining client relationships and ensuring smooth operations.

Pain-points

  1. Manual Data Entry and Redundancy: The need to manually input customer information into multiple systems (app, Hubspot, Shopify) created inefficiencies and increased the likelihood of data errors or inconsistencies. This was a time-consuming and tedious task for both the company and its CSMs.

  2. Delayed Onboarding: The manual data entry process often resulted in delays in onboarding new customers. This hindered customer acquisition and negatively impacted the overall customer experience.

  3. Dependency on CSM Involvement: The onboarding process was heavily reliant on CSM intervention, which limited the company's ability to scale and potentially increased customer acquisition costs. This also created a bottleneck and could have led to longer wait times for new customers.

Opportunities

  1. Centralized Data Management Platform: Develop a platform that serves as a single source of truth for customer data. This platform would integrate with existing systems (app, Hubspot, Shopify) and automatically synchronize data, eliminating the need for manual entry and reducing the risk of data inconsistencies.

  2. Automated Onboarding Workflow: Create an automated onboarding process that leverages the centralized data platform to streamline the customer sign-up experience. This could include pre-filled forms, automated system integrations, and personalized welcome messages, reducing the time and effort required for both the customer and the CSM.

  3. Self-Service Customer Portal: Build a customer portal that allows customers to manage their own information, access support resources, and track their account status. This would empower customers and reduce the workload on CSMs, enabling the company to scale more efficiently.

So, what did we do?

We gave our CSMs an end-to-end system that allows them to completely manage various companies in our system. We also built this system to be scalable in the case that we eventually want to offer our users the ability to self manage within our other product, Raiven Portal.

Additional Features

Information at a glance

CSMs need to be able to see, quickly, top level information of our various companies. Having quick sights on payments, users, contracts, addresses, main branches, and more is important for our CSMs to do their job quickly and efficiently.

Contract Management

One daily task for our CSMs is to follow up with users to ensure they receive the contracts needed to set up their accounts. 
Remove from branch
Remove from company

Additional Features

This system required careful and thorough thinking through very complex intricacies, such as the potential effects of decisions made on the company level versus those made on the branch level.

As a cohesive team, we needed to consider how one level might affect the other and ensure that certain permissions at one level would not unintentionally complicate or negatively impact the statuses, orders, or user experiences at another level.

The Results

An end-to-end system that let’s our CSMs manage our user base.

What I learned

How to think through complex systems and think about edge-cases

I learned from working on our Customer Success Management (CSM) product the vital importance of carefully thinking through how one part of a system is intricately linked to the system as a whole.

This CSM system is exceedingly large and complex, making it the perfect opportunity for me to learn to consider various edge cases and to understand how all actions that a user can take are connected in significant ways.

Additionally, I came to appreciate the importance of creating a robust system that can effectively protect against potential issues that might cause things to become unraveled.

Balancing individual user needs with creating a product for everyone.

Interviews with our internal team showed that each CSM prefers different ways to work, but we can't create a personalized system for everyone. I learned to make choices that benefit all CSMs based on shared challenges rather than individual solutions and their individual work-arounds, which can be misleading.

This experience highlighted the necessity of trade-offs. We focus on designing solutions that address common pain points following the best UX practices, rather than tailoring to individual preferences.