Engagements in Envision
How can we simplify managing complex service engagements across multiple teams in order to deliver the high service quality that Ensono's clients expect?
Backstory
Ensono's Advisory and Consulting business experienced record growth for two years straight. This was great for Ensono, but it also presented new challenges for the company to maintain service quality across a greater number of clients simultaneously. One engagement gone wrong nearly cost Ensono a large client. As the Lead Product Designer on the client portal team, I collaborated with clients and colleagues to create an Engagements module to help drive efficiency, to facilitate communication, and to ensure accountability on both sides.
Identifying Opportunities
Conversations with Stakeholders
My first step was holding discovery sessions with leaders from each category of the consulting business in order to learn more about the problems they were facing and the current client experience.
I asked questions like...
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At any given time, how many active engagements are there across the different categories?
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Can you tell me about a time that a client was dissatisfied after a service engagement?
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How many people are involved in a typical engagement and what are their roles?
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How does knowledge sharing between the different teams on multi-service engagements work today?
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What kinds of action items are clients responsible for during the different types of service engagements?
Key Takeaways
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Missing documents and employee turnover have led to "he-said-she-said" disagreements that can surface at various stages of an engagement
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Disputes are often messy and very expensive to resolve because "the customer is always right"
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Clients need to see a timeline of important events so they have proper expectations and plenty of notice to complete their internal action items on time
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Multi-service engagements lead to lengthy email
trails that are hard to store and search, and which often lead to missed details.
Getting our Clients' Perspectives
After a handful of client conversations, I learned that multi-service engagements sometimes spanned over the course of a couple of years. To some clients, the sequence of events and outcomes all seemed to blur together. Digging through old emails to understand the details of these engagements was inefficient. The overall sentiment was that there were multiple short-comings that were unacceptable in a top-tier, relationship-based, technology sales organization.
A Single Pane of Glass
Clients and Ensono associates needed a central repository for all engagement-related communications and materials so expectations were set clearly on both sides, everyone was held accountable, and no one had to dig through old emails to find documents. I hypothesized both internal cross-team hand-off and post-engagement client satisfaction would improve if this were accomplished.
Overcommunication
Clients and associates need a communication channel outside of email that all of the necessary parties have access to
Transparency
Clients need a clear look into all of the important activities that comprise their consulting engagements
Accountability
Ensono associates need a way to make sure clients are doing their part so Ensono does not get blamed undeservingly
Centralization
Optimize hand-off between consulting silos by providing universal access to important documents
The Solution
Since a large client was threatening to leave, this project immediately became our top priority. With that being said, we rushed to deliver the MVP for this module. Luckily, we were able to present this solution to 3 clients, and our 5 consulting leaders, and received praise for our quick work along with some valuable feedback. Although I did not get a chance to personally present this solution to the at-risk client, the sales manager shared my mockup with them as a show of good faith and they were pleased that Ensono was acting quickly to resolve the issue.
All Engagements Screen
Top-level screen displaying all active service engagements with some details, where users can drill down into the full experience. The future version will have filtering capabilities to allow managers to find specific engagements more quickly.
Task Schedules
We integrated Highcharts Gantt Charts to provide the visibility into engagement schedules that clients need in order to have clear expectations and to be properly prepared. Each task that's listed displays its relevant dates and a description.
Notes and Comments
These two features facilitate the overcommunication and accountability needed to make sure Ensono colleagues and clients are aligned on the details of their engagements. This paper trail will help prevent future disputes and missed deadlines.
Document Center
This single storage site for all service engagement-related documents provides clients and colleagues with easy access to documents and facilitates more efficient hand-off between teams on multi-service engagements. Also, this feature decreases employee turnover-induced document disappearance.
Usability Testing
Results and Iterations
Although stakeholders were in a rush to ship the MVP, we utilized a couple of days at the end of the sprint to run usability tests on 5 users and a couple of errors involving the Gantt chart surfaced.
We learned that the initial "Create Chart" modal needed an extra field in order to avoid an empty chart appearing, which was anticlimactic and unfulfilling for users.
Another bug that caused confusion for users was that when a milestone was clicked, an "Add Milestone" button would appear but adding a milestone to a selected milestone didn't make sense. Only tasks were dependent on milestones. Therefore, a milestone should only be added when editing a chart.
Luckily, our devs were able to complete these iterations as it was important that the valuable Gantt chart feature worked well on the first impression. A glitchy experience would only further diminish Ensono's credibility.
What's Next?
We've created a few analytic events for things we'd like to keep an eye on as this module's use ramps up. We are interested to see how many engagements are created, the titles of the internal users that use the different functionalities in the module, and how much client-user interaction is taking place.
Since increasing client satisfaction with the service engagements module was the main driver, the interface should provide a general sense of how things are going at a glance. Therefore, our developers are working on integrating Google Analyzing Sentiment AI in the comments section. Also, we're aiming to eventually create a client feedback loop within the module.
Finally, devs are currently researching how we can ingest data from the Power BI booklets that are produced post-engagement so we can present them in a way that shows users the information that is most important to them, thereby saving them time digging through the lengthy, super-rich documents.