Global Seller Experience
Responsibilities : Strategy, Research, UX Design
Part of being in presales is to have the right balance between the business asks and user goals.
How much to stretch the lean UX fabric then becomes an engaging question. These case studies talk about how I achieve that to help Salesforce grow its business.
About GSX
GSX is a multidisciplinary team of strategists, designers, and developers within Salesforce and we help deliver scaleable simulated and live demo assets across industries and products that empower sellers to effortlessly showcase the value of the Salesforce. Through user-centred design and technology, we enhance seller satisfaction, productivity, and success, ensuring seamless and impactful experiences for all stakeholders.
Daimler - Semi Lean UX
How I used collaborative research to propose a solution for Daimler Trucks to make operations of the fleets owning their trucks efficient and seamless, helping in winning the deal for Salesforce.
I find semi lean UX process to be most challenging and taxing..Why?
2 sources of truth, version have to be validated
Context
The road truck transport system in India is very varied. A trucking company especially on a growth path deals with challenges at an hourly, weekly...annual basis...and that too for a small sized company.
Now if you are part of a medium fleet sized company the challenges start going exponential.
Especially for the fleet managers who encounter a multitude of those problems...
Why is the truck late? Where is it now?
Why do we always end up hiring inept and inefficient drivers ?
The customer will definitely cancel the contract this time....
Fuel prices increasing again ?
These are just the some of the challenges from a long list...
Discovery
In the absence of primary sources of information, I started with secondary research from different sources and with information from the sales team to know more about the ecosystem, main players and problems.
Selecting the scenario: I chose the more exhaustive scenario for better coverage of the use cases, and delved into the roles and challenges of each of them.
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When the role undertaken and challenges faced by a fleet manager were viewed, the overlap of roles was too evident.
I found that almost all of the goals of an owner are covered by a fleet manager ( if the company has hired one ) and the drivers' roles and responsibilities can be overseen by a fleet manager apart from the ones that involve physical actions.
Definition
So how did I start making sense of all the information?
Chunking the personal and business goals into categories is what I do to get the vision and direction.
The source of the business goals was the interpretation of data from their present systems.
(Mainly their 2 main products: Proserve - service and Truck Connect - analytics)
How many of them are related to user experience?
Ideation
Reading through the summarised goals always provides me a direction of how a good solution should look like.
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The user journey is where I have the most enriching idea generation.
At each stage, the ideas that were noted were tagged to the directions.
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Design
For the ideal solution considering the working pattern of the fleet manager and the technology being proposed the apt channel was a native mobile application supported by tablets and on-premise displays.
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Through meticulous identification of user and business needs, coupled with compelling solution demonstrations, the deal was clinched for Salesforce.
Daikin - Another example
Similar to the above I also worked on an engagement for Daikin Air Conditioners, Indonesia.
The apt identification of user and business needs along with showcasing of the detailed solution through prototypes and presentations helped to win the deal for Salesforce. I did not limit the solution to individual owners but looked at a business owner level with special emphasis on the usage of IoT, incentivised usage, intelligent advice, chatbots etc.
I created a reusable design asset for the Sales team as shown below.
This reusable asset provides an internal advantage of saving time and effort since it is a white-labelled configurable prototype that is easily adapted for other clients/customers with similar use cases.
This is one of the most used assets in the Salesforce demos space and has been used for many engagements.
Franchise Management - Industry Accelerators
How I led a workshop for franchise models to create an accelerator kit applicable for diverse sectors, markets and companies, enabling faster and more innovative solution-building capabilities.
Detaching the research participants from the granular journey to build a broader one is always challenging.
Franchises mostly associated with restaurant businesses come with a varied set of challenges.
If you are a veteran franchise owner you would be involved on multiple fronts...
Monitoring the restaurants...
Planning for expansions...
Analysing the business in detail...
Maintaining healthy relationships with all stakeholders...
Machine breakdowns...etc
Though the task was to create a solution very specific to restaurant franchise owners, I identified the need to broaden the scope to create an industry agnostic solution. But for that, a workshop was essential to involving different stakeholders from the sales team and industry experts.
Getting sales teams to see value and invest their time in the broader workshops has been the main challenge, often they are busy working on specific deals.
I solved this by either conducting these workshops just after their deals cycle which helps them realise missed solutions/ideas which can be used for the next deals. Another approach has been getting participants from sales teams from different industries which helped in discussing cross-functional solutions.
Stage 1: Secondary online Research
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Stage 2: Workshop
Sessions were conducted with 5 participants from the sales and technology team.
To keep the discussions during the workshop industry agnostic the main approach was to prevent the discussion from going towards the restaurant business. Reminding the stakeholders to keep it that way would have been difficult.
The solution: I took a slight leading approach by pre-filling some goals and challenges of the targeted persona without mentioning any specific to the restaurant space.
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Another important aspect was the presence of a competitor named Franconnect.
It was essential to complete a study of the same by marking out the features most liked by its users and making sure they are included in the solution.
Stage 3: Base journey and framework
Creating the reusable base journey with ideation and discussion of products that can be used
Stage 4: Ideation
Building the narrative from the base journey with ideation touching the technologies and products involved.
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Stage 5: Presenting the Story
The framework I created is being used multiple times to identify different use cases and solutions to create the narrative saving a lot of effort and pre-work.
Bank of Baroda - Art of Possible
I worked with lean UX methodologies to create Art of Possible scenarios for Bank of Baroda to project the product capabilities of Salesforce.
Art of Possible are always tricky situations. You don't know what you don't know and hence don't know where to start.
For an important event between the leadership of Bank of Baroda and Salesforce, there was a call for a technology demonstration of Salesforce for a future Sales play. With no specific direction, the direction had to be top-down starting with generic industry research and study of the aspirations of the Brand/Company.
The approach was a story-oriented one hence the ideas and areas of opportunityhad to come from the beginning of research instead of waiting for them to come out from a user journey.
I started to study the external and internal objectives of the bank mainly from their website and about them sections.
As mentioned I started marking the areas of opportunity from the information as I was going through. Knowledge about the products of Salesforce and past experiences of deals helped me in this aspect.
Also studying the landscape and ecosystem of Bank of Baroda helped me look into how solutions and opportunities with Salesforce might look like.
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In the absence of information on the expectations of the customers of bank of Baroda, I looked at the literature about generic problems faced by banking customers and marked out those that were relevant to Bank of Baroda.
All the above points provided areas to ponder over and create the perfect narrative about how the future of banking for Bank of Baroda might look and feel.
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In the Art of possible engagements, I put forward a solution encompassing a long journey like onboarding > building relations > growth together. This generally meets the aim of most organisations.
I was able to create a quick vision for Bank of Baroda through a situation and solution scenario leading to an impactful presentation. the result being an initiation of formal discussions between Bank of Baroda and Salesforce
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