The client is widely known as a leader for networking hardware products. Over the years, they have developed and acquired software and services covering a wide variety of internet technology markets that are independent and complementary to their hardware.
These SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products are in various stages of maturity and autonomy. Some of them were acquired years ago and deliver varying levels of SaaS user experiences.
Customers were are not getting a consistent SaaS experience from my client's SaaS offerings.
Recent acquisitions were competitive, but some products fell short of providing customers with an ideal SaaS user experience. They were exposed to more engaging experiences from the competition like Zoom, Barracuda and the likes.
To solve this problem, the client's CX team engaged us.
What barriers hindered the client’s SaaS offerings from consistently offering best-in-class experiences across products & Services?
What would be the benchmark SaaS experience for sellers, marketers and customers?
A collection of things that I took charge of at various stages during the project.
Structuring information gathering & conceptualization for success
I structured the discovery to allow for findings that could shape processes to drive better experiences intrinsically.
During the first 8 weeks, part of the team was set up to carry out competitor studies and conducting internal brainstorms to prepare for the later prototypes & concepts. I paired our business analysts with experience designers to study competitors and research SaaS experience best practices.
We changed gears during the last 4 weeks to enable conceptualization and prepare our findings for the final readouts. During the planning stages, to ensure we had the right skills to present results, we pulled in people from the film experience teams, and I led a few designers to create UI concepts brought to life with micro-interactions.
For anchoring the ideas, the above studies on SaaS taught me the markers of a successful experience. Part of the study was to consume the pain points and heuristics of the current website and its analytics. These sources enabled effective brainstorms.
To generate ideas, I used how-might-we statements to create “Keyframes”. It is a clean way to present concepts without investing time in high fidelity output. Its main advantage is that it can be used to springboard many ideas about the experience. For that reason, this artefact is instrumental in workshops.
Keyframes were generated and stuck to one of the walls in the room. When the participants were asked to ideate on the future state, they could use these as references to develop more specific use-cases to apply some of these ideas. Alternatively, they could also vote and express thoughts about the concepts.
I was responsible for designing the workshops that enabled participants to share their current state and the ideate future state they would like to aspire to.
I worked with our team to make these workshops repeatable across other SaaS products so more team members could jump in to conduct workshops and later even created a remote version for distributed product teams.
The workshops uncovered many valuable insights that would help the business remove some barriers to create better SaaS experiences across the board. The team used these findings to develop Journey Maps and Affinity Maps and produce prototypes for products targeted to seller and marketer roles.
To enable an excellent end-to-end SaaS experience, several roles need to come together to create success. From Product Teams to Sellers, Marketers and Account Nurturing teams and Data Scientists. The workshops were focused on how each of these roles was attracting and engaging leads plus managing them throughout.
The format for current state journeys had to scale for multiple SaaS products and communicate clearly how the product teams were handling leads from start to finish. They needed to convey stage-specific barriers faced by each product very clearly and any gaps created by the tools they were using or how the tools were utilized.
Additionally, to show that stark difference between the different SaaS businesses, I created a comparison chart for the journeys to be seen side by side.
Wireframes and prototypes became vehicles to showcase a vision that the telecom leader and its SaaS products should aspire to. I created a format in Sketch, and we prototyped the flow on Invision. More detailed prototypes we created to convey unique interactions
A great mix of designers and analysts, plus some folks from the film experience unit, formed the team for this project.
The research I led uncovered some immediate action items for the business to address and provided more visibility between different SaaS business units on how they approached some of the same problems. Most of our near term recommendations have appeared on their customer-facing websites. These were ways to create more barrier-free avenues to discover and use the product.
Additionally, they are also more aware of how the parent business can help SaaS business units succeed in marketing and selling their products and services. These SaaS units have started to come together more often to develop and discuss strategies to stay in sync and create more holistic user experiences.
