Centralized communication
Empowering partners and project fulfillment teams to better communicate with their customers under a single brand and from one inbox
Oct 2022–Apr 2023 (6 months)
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Experience design, product strategy
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Laura Lugo (Product Designer), Joshua Baker (Product Manager)
Context
Vendasta’s fulfillment teams deliver white-labelled digital marketing services that partners can seamlessly resell under their own brand. Direct exposure of these teams to end customers could jeopardize the partner's reputation. Unfortunately, this was common due to mishaps while communicating across multiple platforms.
How might we streamline and safeguard communication around project fulfillment?
An abundance of channels
Delivering high-quality white-labelled projects to end customers requires flawless coordination across multiple parties:
The partner and their customer collaborate on scope and requirements
The partner and fulfillment teams align on timelines and customer feedback
My team and I closely monitored the various communication channels—Slack, Zendesk, hundreds of partner email accounts, and our project management tool, Task Manager—to better understand the challenges faced by our fulfillment teams.
This disjointed experience was clearly impacting partners, leading to frustration. Frustration erodes trust, ultimately increasing the risk of churn.
Mapping a typical journey
We began by encouraging fulfillment teams to shift conversations to Inbox, a new internal communication system launched a few months earlier. Although still in its MVP phase, this provided an opportunity to gather feedback and make iterative improvements.
~ Explain map ~
Reducing delays with contextual insights
When partners messaged our fulfillment teams, they expected us to have detailed information about their customers and projects. However, with multiple ongoing projects from the same partner, teams often had to ask for clarification on which project was being referenced.
Pre-fill project metadata
The 'Message’ button for each project opens an existing chat or starts a new one, with the composer pre-filled with the project's ID. While basic due to technical constraints, this ensures teams immediately know which project the partner is referencing.
Allowing for platform exploration
Once the fulfillment team identified the specific project, they would search the platform for any information that might be relevant to the conversation. However, Inbox could only be accessed as a full-screen modal, thus blocking the pages underneath and hindering exploration.
Minimized drawer view
Chats can be minimized to a drawer, keeping the page content visible while retaining chat context. This design mirrors Inbox's mobile interface, ensuring a consistent user experience and decreasing development efforts.
Building trust through transparency
Partners frequently felt their messages were ignored, perceiving Inbox as unreliable due to long wait times. However, data revealed that most of those messages were sent outside business hours. Enabling teams to set expectations for response time could help address this perception.
Inline notifications & a persistent alert
Automated inline notifications confirm that messages have been received and provide updates on project-related user activity. An alert can also be used to display a custom message about business availability and will remain visible in the chat at all times.
Decrease in white-label breaches
-22 hr response times
+100% monthly messages
Exploring the future
To establish Inbox as the single source of truth for customer communication, it was crucial to integrate as much context as possible into the chat interface. Before transitioning to a different team, I worked on concepts to envision a more powerful, future-ready Inbox.