Multi-Divisional Portal

Year

2023

Client

Professional Services - BlueRock enterprise product

Role

Lead UI & UX Designer

Deliverable

How I transformed stakeholder insights into a unified, cross-functional dashboard amidst a sea of data

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How I Was Successful

I successfully implemented a comprehensive design system, featuring a wide array of components and their variants, to effectively communicate user flows during prototype presentations.

Additionally, I designed a balanced dashboard that accurately displayed all relevant data in a concise format, ensuring valuable information was conveyed to users without overwhelming them with extraneous details.

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Challenges Overcome

This process involved extensive iteration on specific widgets, and constant evaluation to ensure each piece of data contributed to the user's goals - I was careful not to boil the ocean whilst problem solving, resulting in a succinct and balanced dashboard that displayed only relevant information.

I advocated and spoke up in large stakeholder meetings, for the necessity of continued user workflow testing, to properly gain insights into how the product will solve cross-sell issues within the company.

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Key Learnings

Creating a balanced dashboard required balancing succinct information to provide users with real benefits in just a few clicks, while also being detailed enough to enable actionable insights.

I found it really useful to set up the design system well before building the product, but also found that a lot of re-work could have been avoided had more in-depth local variables been used for things like spacing.

MVP-first approach can allow small teams to quickly and iteratively build a product from design to dev - however there comes a critical point where real user testing with the current prototype becomes essential to truly evolve the product into a truly useful tool.

user story #01

As an advisor, I want to see the last time an Advisor communicated with the client, so that I know who is the most recent point of contact

user story #02

As an Advisor I want to identify all division interactions with my client so that I have visibility of all current engagements

user story #03

As an Advisor I want to see what divisions have been in contact with my client, so that I can offer relevant cross-sell opportunities

user story #04

As an Advisor, I want to view client meetings across all divisions, so that I can understand what type of meetings have occurred in the past, present and future, to give me more context in upcoming meetings

user story #05

As an Advisor, I want to understand potential meeting clashes, so that I can provide a better client experience

user story #06

one

Decentralised data structure

two

Lack of cross-sell between divisions

three

Inconsistent client experience

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Business Problem

For advisors in a dynamic Professional Services firm. Their company, a collection of smaller businesses merged together through numerous acquisitions, struggles to maintain a cohesive view of client information.

The fragmented data landscape, with various applications and CRMs unable to communicate seamlessly, creates a significant challenge.

As a result, two primary issues emerge. First, the potential to leverage existing customer information for effective cross-selling is stifled. Second, clients have to deal with separate interactions from different divisions, which doesn't provide the best experience. Their ability to serve clients efficiently and drive business growth is at stake, demanding a solution to unify and streamline the data landscape.

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Our Users

“Everytime I get a referral from another division, I have to ask for the exact same details off the client - who then get frustrated filling out these huge forms and can’t understand why we don’t already have that information!”

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Our Clients

It’s frustrating having to book multiple meetings with different divisions, sometimes I'll have an appointment with my accountant, and then with my lawyer in the same week, but they co-ordinate to see me on the same day! - it definitely feels like I'm working with multiple companies

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Our Company

The creation of an Advisor Portal would give us a tool to empower Advisors - for example, the portal would know how many clients we have that are over 60 - and that might beed financial planning for retirement. This would flag inside the app and allow us to cross-sell much more effectively

one

Increase cross-sell from an average 1.2 services per client, to 3

two

Increase the % of internal referral sales month on month

three

Improve client experience - measured using NPS score

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Measuring Success

Our goal was to develop an internal multipage portal tailored for Advisors spanning diverse divisions such as Lawyers, Accountants, and Financial Planners.

The application was designed to seamlessly aggregate customer data from multiple sources, such as Xero and MyCRM - encompassing past and current deals, communication history, document uploads, demographic information, as well as leveraging AI to start synthesising these data points.

Embracing this holistic perspective would enable Advisors to cultivate a profound insight into their customers' preferences, as well as enhance cross-selling initiatives throughout the organisation.

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Product Roadmap

Learning Plan & Benchmarking

What do we know, what don’t we know, what gap are we filling, and how are we providing a real solution to a current problem?

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DEFINE

Exploration of available data

No work on the user flows could commence, until we had a broader understanding of the exact data that the CRM

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DEFINE

Stakeholder collaboration

I wanted to empower Advisors to actively engage and contribute to the ideation phase with the use of greyscale, unfinished wireframes that fostered a shared ownership of the product, and encouraged future collaboration

IDEATE

Incremental Delivery

I presented high fidelity mock-up of the main dashboard to stakeholders, as an MVP of what could be created - this allowed more buy-in for the product and allowed us to keep moving forward

ITERATE

AI Driven Integrations

Workshops undertaken with stakeholders, were used to re-focus our business goals, in a way that would leverage and apply AI to new and old widgets

VERSION 1

Development and presentation of the first functional prototype

We presented our Figma-prototyped dashboard, prioritized for showcasing to stakeholders and investors. Multiple pages were developed, but the dashboard was the main focus.

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Next Steps

User workflow mapping

Work with marketing to map out the how cross-selling is currently done, where the pain points are - to accurately pin point how the dashboard can prompt and facilitate trust with Advisors to effectively cross-sell

AI Integration

The influx of AI technologies was already propelling many elements of the Advisor Portal, namely the email insights and chatbot widgets. The next step would be to work out rules for propensity modelling for cross-selling services, in away that was relevant to the tool

Gamification

The Advisor Portal was the first step in empowering our Advisors using all possible client data we could show. However, having the information in front of advisors would not guarantee that they would magically fit this into their daily workflow. More gamification within the app could greatly increase the uptake of use

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Final Notes

This portal is an ongoing business project, the next phase in this plan involves testing the prototypes with the agreed upon users from multiple divisions - to gain more insights into how the information is useful to them in different stages of client contact.

There is still much work to be done to test how this application will integrate with the current cross-sell workflow, in a way that works hand in hand with current marketing tools - and improves the experience of the client.

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