Assign and Ship Devices
The Collaboration Hardware as-a-Service (CHaaS) is a selection of product offerings tailored for remote workers for their work-from-home setups. The bundle includes things like, headsets, Desk Pros, and license for Webex.
I led the design of a new feature to facilitate how customers ship multiple and different devices to their remote employees
Partners who place orders for Collaboration Hardware currently utilize Salesforce to create the quote, execute the deal, and place the order. The entire sales cycle can take up to 6 months, which is a risk for both customer and partner. In an effort to reduce the time taken to close a deal and in alignment with the company’s as-a-Service strategy, I identified one of the most arduous and time consuming parts of the sales cycle to be the collection and upload of shipping addresses and assignment of devices to each employee.
71% of customer and partners surveyed requested the ability to upload addresses after the order has been placed. They cited it was crucial for resolving errors or unexpected address changes.
Since post-sale address upload is not a Salesforce feature, our team’s solution was to build an integration that gives partners the options to
(1) [Existing] Use original address collected during quote as the shipping address and ship everything there
OR
(2A) Choose the responsible party for submitting individual addresses for shipment i.e. partner or customer
(2B) Set a deadline for the address submission after the order is placed so the devices can be shipped.
Placement for integration in Salesforce order experience
86% of customer and partners said that they wanted to Cisco allow direct shipments to the secondary locations in order to save time, logistics, and money.
“The cost of shipping the device from Cisco to my headquarters, then shipping the device again from my company headquarters to the additional office is…a waste of money, so shipping it directly to the additional office would save me a fair amount of money...”
Customer, IT Manager
I implemented the customer feedback directly into the designs, where it served as the foundation and cemented itself as the minimum design requirements.
I explored multiple designs, anticipating additional pain points and streamlining the experience to be less heavy and doable in a single work day for the customer.
I pitched 3 options and chose the most feasible within the given business and technical constraints while remaining as user-centric as possible.
OPTion 1: Spreadsheet
My first pass was to emulate a familiar environment for customers — an Excel sheet.
Engineering feedback: While showing this early on to the developers, I discvered that the front-end team did not have the time and resources to build this from scratch, especially because they didn’t have a pre-existing pattern for the table cells and in-line verification of addresses. The way address verification has been built in other areas was through a form. It would have been hard for them to justify building this idea for a “small, one-off” task.
I identified a creative opportunity for technical and user efficiency.
option 2: address collection form
Customers may or may not have easy access to their employees’ addresses - regardless, for the sake of privacy, they shouldn’t and the appropriate path is to ask each employee individually and guarantee security. I came up with this idea to facilitate the process of seeking permission and respecting the private information of the end user.
Feedback: This idea for a fully facilitated, consolidated experience is the ideal for users to not have to use multiple tools to accomplish this one task. However, the team felt the idea required more time and buy-in from all stakeholders, so we agreed to stick to the most literal implementation of our customers’ feedback.
Ultimately, I balanced time constraints, ideation, and usability to ship a feature on time.
option 3 / final solution: Bulk Upload and Manual Entry
The agreed upon solution by the collective team was to scale back to manual entry of addresses and a bulk upload. Given the time and resource constraints, this was the most realistic solution that also addresses all the customer requests in our research.
In collaboration with engineering, the solution utilizes many pre-built components, such as the address verification form, reducing the workload for our engineering team and accelerating our progress to ship in time.
To review, I designed a new process for Cisco, which will influence and enhance our designs in customer delivery going forward. While our org is going through changes and process restructuring, my work is the beginning of better collaboration between the design team and the engineering department, streamlining execution and construction. I introduced the concept of a design backlog for both cross-collaborators and internally among the various design roles with our department.
Want to talk more about this project? Feel free to reach out at rachelanlin@gmail.com.