Whiteboarding A New Leads Process

Designers chatting and giving feedback during the whiteboarding session.

First Command is still new to Salesforce and many implementation decisions were made to have similar process to the previous CRM tool.

This had consequences on the following:

  • It is difficult to input new leads into the system, causing many leads not to be documented.
  • There are too many data fields, which makes it difficult to update, resulting in poor data reliability.
  • There's no overview of their clients' financial plans or see their goals, which especially impacts clients who must frequently move for the military.
  • There is too much ambiguity for data that must integrate with other tools for various workflows.

Objectives

I led a design exercise to ideate on ways we can improve our client profiles in Salesforce with the following goals:

  • Train new designers to get them more paper prototyping experience.
  • Introduce the team to integrations with other tools and unused Salesforce features.
  • Make adding leads easier by leveraging dynamic forms throughout the process, and reduce the amount of information while meeting KYC (Know Your Client) regulations.
  • Provide client overviews by leveraging relevant details across financial plans, financial goals, and systemic flags to help prompt client engagements (e.g. recent changes with salary, large cash reserves, poorly performing investments, recent negative sentiment).

Organizing the Data

An example of the previous system where salesforce is funcitoning more as a database.

Over the past decade First command has used multiple forms and systems to meet KYC requirements and record data. I tasked the group with analyzing the previous designs then simplify the data as much as possible to focus on meeting required fields, and to group data more intuitively.

Lead Page Requirements

The output of a card sorting exercise that shows the group's opinion of how data on the lead page should be grouped together more intuitively.

Client Page Requirements

The output of a card sorting exercise that shows the group's opinion of how data on the client page should be grouped together more intuitively.

Paper Prototyping

After the group was more familiar with the objective, we broke into different groups to envision how sections could change across the onboarding journey. Then, we brought in one of the product managers for Salesforce for feedback who mentioned additional items to consider and how our proposed changes would affect other systems.

Recommendations

I worked with another UX researcher to consolidate our findings and include recommendations from other business leaders for feedback. We tied in other functionality for upcoming features as a way to make Salesforce be a holistic overview of clients rather than a database, and to leverage new features such as insights from financial details and more integration with clients' financial plans.

Lead Start

An updated mockup of the leads page that made data fields more legible, reduced clutter, and put data fields into categories.

Lead End

An updated mockup of the leads page that now meets KYC requirements and is ready for the lead to become a prospect.

Client Page

An updated mockup of the client page that includes leveraging additional features, such as financial plan information and insights from financial accounts.

Reflection

One thing that stood out during research observations (for later initiatives) was that a lot of offices have a strong delineation different types of work between advisors and assistants. While smaller offices have more nuances, it may make sense for the system to have more specific sections to switch between high level overviews and more specific workflows to allow offices to better communicate. We didn't fully appreciate or apply the nuance of how that could impact the system, but I believe it is related to a more fundamental dichotomy found in much of our research: that senior advisors find hand holding to be unnecessary and offensive, while younger hires struggle to learn all of the job requirements and processes without proper support.

Additionally, this project helped me learn a lot about managing departmental level requests that impact multiple stakeholder teams. This effort stemmed from a PM who was tasked by leadership to improve a section that home office employees had trouble finding, and wasn't reliably updated by advisors. Part of the point of this exercise was for my team to have more awareness that we have lots of different intake forms that are much longer than necessary, resulting in many duplications of fields and unclear workflows. While I understood the request was for a smaller 'quick fix,' the system itself needed a more holistic vision and overhaul.

Due to the complexity of the tool and a change in personnel at the time, I regret not having similar sessions with stakeholders to better communicate the problem, and provide more support for the PM to have more data to argue for rescoping the initiative with leadership. As an initiative that was largely for the benefit of the home office I thought it was more important to demonstrate benefits for the advisors using the tool, which I still believe.

Enlarged image