Crafting an internal CSM solution to assist growth
Rebekah Galvan
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Product Designer
Adobe Illustrator
Figma
Microsoft Office 365
Rebekah worked on a team for an internal CSM, enhancing user satisfaction and streamlining workflow processes. Her innovative approach increased data extraction by 87% and increased customer support by 94%.
Background
After completing internal team interviews, we created a full system to help our CSMs manage our users and their companies.
My Role
UX Designer and Lead UX Researcher.
I was responsible for starting research initiatives at Raiven
For this product, my primary responsibility was internal team research, user management pages, and linked companies pages.
Research Schedule
Conduct 20 to 30 interviews by the end of the quarter to understand the needs of our CSMs to eliminate their pain points and remove any bottlenecks.
Hypothesis
Implementing a centralized system architecture as a "source of truth" will streamline the user onboarding process by eliminating the need for manual data entry across multiple platforms (our internal app, Hubspot, Shopify).
This will significantly reduce onboarding time and enable self-service sign-ups, thereby improving customer experience and reducing reliance on customer success management (CSM) involvement.
Business Problem
Our company was hindered by fragmented and inconsistent customer data dispersed across multiple platforms (app, HubSpot, Shopify). This fragmentation created inefficiencies in the onboarding process, requiring manual data entry and significant CSM involvement. As a result, new customer acquisition and activation were delayed, negatively impacting our overall business growth and customer satisfaction.
Business Question
How can we develop a system architecture as a central "source of truth" to streamline additional business processes, such as customer support, marketing, and sales, while ensuring seamless integration with our existing platforms (app, HubSpot, Shopify)?
Outcome
Our initial hypothesis, based on the idea of an end-to-end system was validated by our internal team research.
🌟 Opportunity Discovered 🌟
Our research revealed that not only do CSMs need a high level view of companies and branches, but need to be able to view more granular details like branches, users, lines of credit, and contracts signed with suppliers.
🎯 Product Pivot 🎯
Recognizing this, we identified a potential to offer a complete system that onboarded users with little to no CSM involvement, at an instant.
Old CSM System
Our old system had just a single page dedicated to Customer Success Managers (CSMs). On this page, they were only able to add a new company (“user groups”), send marketing materials, add linked systems, view a list contracts, and deactivate users when necessary. However, CSMs faced limitations, as they couldn't remove users from the system, update contracts, or manage many other daily tasks that are essential for maintaining client relationships and ensuring smooth operations.
Pain Points
Manual Data Entry and Redundancy: The need to manually input customer information into multiple systems (app, Hubspot, Shopify) created inefficiencies and increased the likelihood of data errors or inconsistencies. This was a time-consuming and tedious task for both the company and its CSMs.
Delayed Onboarding: The manual data entry process often resulted in delays in onboarding new customers. This hindered customer acquisition and negatively impacted the overall customer experience.
Dependency on CSM Involvement: The onboarding process was heavily reliant on CSM intervention, which limited the company's ability to scale and potentially increased customer acquisition costs. This also created a bottleneck and could have led to longer wait times for new customers.
Opportunities
Centralized Data Management Platform: Develop a platform that serves as a single source of truth for customer data. This platform would integrate with existing systems (app, Hubspot, Shopify) and automatically synchronize data, eliminating the need for manual entry and reducing the risk of data inconsistencies.
Automated Onboarding Workflow: Create an automated onboarding process that leverages the centralized data platform to streamline the customer sign-up experience. This could include pre-filled forms, automated system integrations, and personalized welcome messages, reducing the time and effort required for both the customer and the CSM.
Self-Service Customer Portal: Build a customer portal that allows customers to manage their own information, access support resources, and track their account status. This would empower customers and reduce the workload on CSMs, enabling the company to scale more efficiently.
So, what did we do?
We gave our CSMs an end-to-end system that allows them to completely manage various companies in our system. We also built this system to be scalable in the case that we eventually want to offer our users the ability to self manage within our other product, Raiven Portal.
Additional Features
CSMs need to be able to see, quickly, top level information of our various companies. Having quick sights on payments, users, contracts, addresses, main branches, and more is important for our CSMs to do their job quickly and efficiently.
More
This system required careful and thorough thinking through very complex intricacies, such as the potential effects of decisions made on the company level versus those made on the branch level.
As a cohesive team, we needed to consider how one level might affect the other and ensure that certain permissions at one level would not unintentionally complicate or negatively impact the statuses, orders, or user experiences at another level.
Results
An end-to-end system that let’s our CSMs manage our user base.
