Working on funnel management
From first contact to closing the deal, the sales funnel is an important tool for managing the B2B sales process for direct sales. To build a sales funnel, most business customers rely on a mix of purchased, configurable and independently developed software components.
Because of the high complexity of the process, Swisscom’s users previously needed documentation to help them navigate the funnel management application and get their daily work done. System owners and stakeholders have long adopted changes whenever they could to create a better user experience for the key processes.
But now the decision has been taken to consolidate the various funnel management applications into a single solution, and simultaneously improve user guidance.
Lean UX principles approach the solution one step at a time
Because of our previous collaboration on the redesign of the My Swisscom Business portal, we were already familiar with the Swisscom design components and guidelines. But they came to us for this new project because of our proven ability to simplify complex and extensive applications.
At the beginning of this project, the major challenge was to delve into the entire breadth and depth of the topic and the applications. In addition, the project remit said that the design components that were developed for My Swisscom Business should also be used in the new funnel management solution. Because these had already been developed further within Swisscom, a close collaboration with the Swisscom UX designers was necessary to address the following questions:
Are there new solutions developed for My Swisscom Business that should also influence the design of the new funnel management application?
Can the design elements that were developed for this be reused or do new ones need to be developed?
In accordance with lean UX principles, the project team got started with hypotheses and prototypes at an early stage, and used these to iteratively improve possible variants of the implementation. This method proved to be essential because new stakeholder requirements were constantly being added-and these could be addressed quickly and flexibly.
Better user guidance through improved process design
Thanks to a regular cadence of feedback rounds, we could work with the Swisscom project team to design a new approach to the funnel management application-one that guides users in the optimal way through all their tasks right from the start. Instead of a huge window with many fields that could theoretically be filled out at any time, the relevant responsibilities and tasks to be completed are now clearly managed through the entire sales funnel.
Users are only shown information and tasks that are relevant to the present moment, which greatly simplifies the process: sales opportunities recorded in the solution always have complete information when they progress to a responsible person in a downstream sales channel for further processing. Operators are then informed by email as soon as an opportunity requires their attention. At the same time the dashboard offers them an overview of the upcoming work and tasks.
The project is not completely finished: the new funnel management solution is still in development and new adaptations and requirements are being added. But Swisscom has already benefitted enormously from Creaholic know-how: because of the early collaboration with stakeholders we quickly created a prototype of the new application that already incorporated feedback from everyone involved.
Are you facing a similar challenge?
Does this case study speak to you? Would you like to discuss a similar collaboration?If yes, then reach out to our experts!
