Salesforce for the Mainframe
Roles & Responsibilities
I joined the Product Management team at Compuware to be responsible for the UI/UX Design of all of their web-based applications. Compuware is a company that built its reputation on Big Iron (Mainframes) and Desktop Apps for COBOL programming.
Web Design and Development was a relatively new space; so they brought in a fresh Product Manager and Designer (Me) To lead the Product Team in creating a Salesforce Experience Cloud based Support Center, Knowledge Base, and Ticketing portal.
Moderated User Research
Before we began the PM and I created a research plan; and setup moderated hour long interviews with a number of our core clients. One advantage to a company with a history like Compuware is they have a strong foundational relationship with all of their customers; who they do regular testing with.
We utilized these moderated sessions to test hypothesis and build a requirement set.
Learning the Lightning Design System
As Salesforce was new to Compuware, and I was the first UI/UX Designer they had hired – I had to teach myself lightning. Adobe XD and Sketch were the tools of the day, and neither had an easy to download Design System for Lightning like Figma does today, so I had to review all of their documents myself and build out components in Adobe XD. I then had to brand them accordingly and partnered with Compuware’s marketing team to ensure that the designs met Brand Standards; as a Digital Style Guide was unavailable we did it collaboratively.
The Developers were also new to Lightning, so we had many opportunities to test and learn. I would pair program with the developers so I could learn how Lightning behaved under the hood.
Support Center Results
Before, out of the box.
One of the Final Prototypes
Case Management / Ticketing Portal
A large motivating factor behind Salesforce was end to end case management, as such I had to design a customized user interface for the data points relevant to the sales and support reps inside Compuware.
To Zendesk
UI/UX Design Lead for the CRM Portfolio at Amway
Due to my Salesforce Experience Amway brought me on board to help them deploy Salesforce; but as we began the executive team decided to utilize ZenDesk instead. Which was honestly a bit more difficult to work with. While Salesforce has an established Design System and many docs; ZenDesk (And Amway at the time) did not.
Creating a Design System
When I joined Amway the first thing I asked for was access to their DS. Which as it turned out was completely written – no components, and every designer was using disparate tools (Some were on Sketch, others on XD, or even InDesign) and creating all of their own components from scratch.
I did not want to waste my, or any other’s designers time recreating components for every project and designer – and sold leadership on the creation of a Design System Component Library in Sketch.
The new Amway DS drastically improved the experience of every designer on the team and lead to establishing patterns that would ripple across all design at Amway.
ZenDesk Designs
As the CRM Design Lead my team and I began working with the CRM portfolio to create Epics, and then we would partner with product teams to deliver features.
We were responsible for Amway.com’s registration, and account management – as well as the Loyalty program.
ZenDesk was the Amway Internal side of all of these experiences. As such we had to build interfaces to change, view, and update that information.
ZenDesk was primarily used by the CSR (Support) teams, and we would regularly meet with them to understand what opportunities they had for enhancements within ZenDesk.
At the Portfolio team level we would prioritize enhancements and features, and I lead a team of agency designers to create the end results you see below.
& Beyond
Promotion to Business Success Design Lead
Amway underwent a re-org and I converted over to a promotional opportunity – being the UI/UX Design lead for the ‘ABO Success’ department. ABOs are the lifeblood of Amway, where more traditional companies have Customer – Amway has the ABO. They buy Amway’s products then resell them for a commission. Amway does not interact directly with the customers of the ABO, but does handle things like drop-shipping, and tracks customer sales metrics on the back-end. Not all of this data is exposed to the ABO, much of it is handled internally by the Sales Account Management team.
Research into Account Management
I began a year-long endeavor to gain an understand into the Account Manager. We interviewed dozens of internal Amway sales employees and built personas, painpoints, and learned about how their job works.
As it turned out the AMs used a large amount of different tools to do their job; and the data on those tools was inconsistent. The tools varied by market, with some even relying on legacy Mainframe green screens to pull data out. Some even tracked things manually in spreadsheets
They also repeated the same tasks at the same time every month, as commission/bonus payouts were done on a monthly cadence and the ABOs would rush at the end of month to log all of their sales.
I had the novel idea that if their work was linked to the month, let’s visualize it that way. Please find below a link to a monthly journey map – click on the individual touch-points to learn about pain points, and much more.
A Magical Solution
During our research we learned that one of the key tools in-use by the Sales team, and the Finance team – was MAGIC, an outdated internal CRM tool that allowed you to manipulate any factor of an ABOs account.
Magic was the Source of Truth for all data. Everything flowed out of MAGIC into other systems, including end-user facing applications.
So what would happen if we overhauled MAGIC, and built a robust Account Management solution?
Below you can find a prototype I created for a pitch to our executive leaders of Sales and Technology, for what an overhauled MAGIC could be. This Prototype was designed as part of a scripted presentation, but in the sidebar you can find the existing screens, and then under Portfolio – the redesign.
In Conclusion
The key to developing a CRM is not in the tool you choose, it’s about learning what your users – both internal and external need to solve business problems. Streamline access to key data, or reports, and automate repetitive tasks. CRM is largely about user communication, and giving the roles in your organization that are in that position to communicate with your customers or end-users what they need at their fingertips.