Advancing in-platform communication

Enabling seamless partner-vendor communication and service fulfillment

Product strategy, visual design

  • 6 months

  • 1 Product Manager, 5 Engineers

Context

Vendors provide digital marketing services that partners can effortlessly resell under their own brand. However, coordinating service fulfillment across multiple platforms proved challenging, causing delays and frustrating customers.

How might we streamline communication around service fulfillment?

PROBLEM

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 vendors align on timelines and customer feedback

From Slack to Zendesk to hundreds of partner email accounts and finally, our project management tool, Task Manager, it was extremely difficult for vendors to maintain context on their ongoing projects.

This disjointed experience was clearly impacting partners, leading to frustration. Frustration erodes trust, ultimately increasing the risk of churn.

DISCOVERY

Mapping a typical journey

My team and I closely monitored the various communication channels used by our vendors to better understand the challenges they faced. We also held focus group sessions to dig deeper into our observations.

We began by encouraging teams to shift conversations to Inbox, our recently released in-platform communication system. While still in its beta release, we had the perfect opportunity to gather feedback and improve usability.

PAIN POINT

“Which project are you referring to?”

When partners messaged our vendors, they expected them to have detailed information about their customers and projects. However, with multiple ongoing projects from the same partner, vendors often had to ask for clarification on which project was being referenced. This meant it could take hours for the partner and fulfillment to be on the same page regarding the project in question.

solution

Providing contextual insights

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. This ensures teams immediately know which project the partner is referencing. While rudimentary and slightly more prone to human error, it was the best we could do due to technical constraints, 

EXPLORATION

Working with constraints

Initially, we were going to create new conversations for every ongoing project. In this scenario, I explored a persistent banner that linked to the project the conversation was about for easy access. We later decided to maintain a single conversation thread between a partner and a fulfillment team.

Once decided on a single thread, I also explored tagging projects with an @ or / action. This would make it easier for the user to reference the project without having to click in from the project. This was deemed out of scope from a technical perspective.

EXPLORATION

Creating a two-way street

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PAIN POINT

Opening multiple tabs to gather information

Once vendors identified the specific project, they would search the platform for any information that might be relevant to the conversation. However, because Inbox was built as a shared service across platforms, it could only be accessed as a full-screen modal, thus blocking the pages underneath and hindering exploration.

SOLUTION

Allowing for platform-wide exploration

Chats can be minimized to a drawer, keeping the page content visible while retaining chat context. This design is also used as Inbox's mobile interface, ensuring a consistent user experience and decreasing development efforts.

PAIN POINT

“Did anyone receive my message?”

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.

SOLUTION

Building trust through transparency

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.

EXPLORATION

Detailed availability setting

For a future iteration, I explored dynamically displaying the availability message based on the business’ working hours. This could reduce banner blindness that the current implementation might suffer from.

Improved experience: fewer white-label breaches

Decreased response times: 24h to 2h

Increased adoption: +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.

learnings

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Taking a product beyond MVP

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Being agile and pivoting

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