Sales Platform Experience
Overview
When I first joined Asurion, I spent my time on the sales team, unofficially dubbed the "Money Team." Our main focus at this time was creating a customizable, easy to use tool that could be used across the organization that would allow us to present offers through any channel (i.e. phone, in-store, in-person, website)
Research Methods:
Discovery Workshops, User interviews, Site visits with users
Tools:
Digital Whiteboarding Tools (Miro), Figma,
Opportunity
Asurion had many different channels through which they were using to make sales. These included online, in-store, in-home, and over-the-phone. Many of these sales flows were very similar with slight nuances. However, each channel had a dedicated product team working for each individual flow. So essentially, several teams were working to solve the same problems, just in different areas. We saw this as an opportunity to increase efficiency. Every time a single change was made to any sales flow, a team had to utilize time and resources to make the update. If that same change had to be made in another channel, another team would have to use time and resources again.
An example of a sales flow used by techs that make offers via phone calls.
It was one of various similar flows utilized by the company.
It was one of various similar flows utilized by the company.
Our proposal: what if we could create a single tool, where we can build and update once, and that build or update can be leveraged by others without them having to redo the same work.
Our Solution:
We envisioned a single platform that all teams could leverage for their uses to minimize doing redundant work. Our solution was one sales tool for all lines of businesses. It would include shared backend capabilities, API's, and offer flows, so teams don't have to start from scratch when building flows to make offers. It would also allow for front-end customization where teams could change out the content as needed.
Goals:
• Reduce redundancy
• Increase product team efficiency
• Increase agent efficiency (more user-friendly tools)
• Reduce redundancy
• Increase product team efficiency
• Increase agent efficiency (more user-friendly tools)
• Built a centralized, modular sales SDK usable by all teams
• Shared APIs + unified backend structure
• Front-end content customizable via Contentful (no devs needed for updates)
• Designed for seamless drop-in use within existing platforms
• Shared APIs + unified backend structure
• Front-end content customizable via Contentful (no devs needed for updates)
• Designed for seamless drop-in use within existing platforms
Our sales tool (highlighted in bottom left) can integrate within an existing app. Shown here expanded, it can also collapse out of view when not in use, allowing for a better user experience for sales agents who often times are utilizing several applications on the screen at once.
The sales tool allows the user to view all offers a customer is eligible for, through the use of API's. After users select an offer, they are presented with key selling points to inform the customer, and then taken through billing information. All offers, images, and content is interchangeable, making this a plug and play tool for other product teams to easily use.
The Sales Took SDK (Softwarde development kit) provides a drop-in integration to start selling any product offered by the company (or it's partners), allowing teams to enable sales through there chosen channel as quickly as they can implement their content.
Key Notes:
Team utilized the Contentful platform that allows for customizable content, that even someone who has never used contentful before, could quickly learn and input sales content. In other words, once the Sales tool is implemented, a team doesn't need a developer for every single change. This frees up developer time and empowers other team members to freely make updates as needed.
Team utilized the Contentful platform that allows for customizable content, that even someone who has never used contentful before, could quickly learn and input sales content. In other words, once the Sales tool is implemented, a team doesn't need a developer for every single change. This frees up developer time and empowers other team members to freely make updates as needed.
In terms of improvements to our flow here, we explored ways to help experts overcome declined offers. One of those explorations involved including rebuttals to the most common decline reasons in the flow to aid experts in their sales pitches
This is one use case example for how this platform can be used. The advantage, however, is that the SDK can be leveraged by other teams, and the content exchanged and the order of the flow and branding customized to fit their needs. They can take advantage of the shared backend technology to get sales flows up and running very quickly and updates can be made without a heavy lift for a development team.
