Mobile

User Research

Prototyping

Tulip Clienteling - Group Follow Ups

Consolidating sales associates daily actions and helping them send messages in bulk to maximize associate time on the salesfloor.

About

This is a enhancement of Tulip’s follow ups experience. Our goal was to increase sales associate’s (SAs) salesfloor time by allowing them to send messages quickly in bulk. During my time at Tulip, I was part of the Clienteling team which focuses on communication between sales associates and their clients.

Timeline

Oct 2023 - Dec 2023

Team

1 Designer, 2 Software Engineers, 2 Product Managers

INTRODUCTION

How follow ups work

Associates have a ton of clients to keep in touch with, constantly sending birthday reminders, promotional events, and reaching out to see how things are going with their new products. This is profound to maintaining a good relationship and generating more sales. Associates use Tulip to keep track upcoming follow ups and to send messages when the follow ups are due.

Time Problem

Associates can only send follow ups individually on Tulip, which makes completing follow up actions time consuming. When an associate has over a hundred clients, sending follow ups individually becomes cumbersome, let alone seeing a list of over 100 actions to take.

INTRODUCTION

How follow ups work

INTRODUCTION

How follow ups work

Collaborating with our users

Tulip’s roadmap is heavily influenced by the problems our users face so to determine the value of this feature request, we set up a couple discovery calls to take a deeper dive.

Questions asked

Why are associates sending follow ups?
How are they getting these follow ups? How do they send follow ups?
Can you walk us through typical day where the associate needs to send a follow up?
What do they do after sending follow ups?

What we found was that

Associates check their list of follow ups periodically during the week and will take upwards to 30 minutes daily to send messages.
Corporate sends details about what follow ups to send and oftentimes they are the same message that needs to be sent to multiple people.

Goals

Simplify Follow Ups List

Easily view all follow ups with the type and same message.

Simplify Follow Ups List

Easily view all follow ups with the type and same message.

Simplify Follow Ups List

Easily view all follow ups with the type and same message.

Help Associates

Increase the amount of time associates have on the floor by reducing the time it takes to send bulk messages.

Help Associates

Increase the amount of time associates have on the floor by reducing the time it takes to send bulk messages.

Help Associates

Increase the amount of time associates have on the floor by reducing the time it takes to send bulk messages.

Help Tulip

Optimizing follow ups as part as our Q4 goals in introducing bulk communication methods to improve associate to client communication.

Help Tulip

Optimizing follow ups as part as our Q4 goals in introducing bulk communication methods to improve associate to client communication.

Help Tulip

Optimizing follow ups as part as our Q4 goals in introducing bulk communication methods to improve associate to client communication.

Current Experience

The only way for associates to send the same message to multiple people is to copy and paste the message and open each chat individually. After that, they would need to individually mark each task as complete. This is suboptimal because it is time consuming and associates tend to procrastinate since it is a tedious task to do.

Opportunity

We have the opportunity to simplify the list of follow ups to include groupings to make it easier for associates to see what follow ups they have and to incorporate bulk messaging to reduce time spent repeating the same action. We can leverage group messaging which is a feature I worked on prior to this!

TECHNICAL CONSTRAINT

We can't change the UI

Since follow ups was done years ago, we’re working with old code that isn’t optimized and if we were to make huge changes to the screens, it will take a considerable amount of effort that extends past the dev’s appetite.
This means that the solution will have to reuse the existing UI and I kept this in mind while working on the wireframes.

Flows to be done

Group follow ups

View corporate generated follow ups that have been grouped together.

Group follow ups

View corporate generated follow ups that have been grouped together.

Group follow ups

View corporate generated follow ups that have been grouped together.

Group follow ups

View corporate generated follow ups that have been grouped together.

Bulk messaging

Associate can select who they want to reach out to and send messages in bulk.

Bulk messaging

Associate can select who they want to reach out to and send messages in bulk.

Bulk messaging

Associate can select who they want to reach out to and send messages in bulk.

Bulk messaging

Associate can select who they want to reach out to and send messages in bulk.

Bulk complete

After sending the follow ups, associate can mark them all as complete.

Bulk complete

After sending the follow ups, associate can mark them all as complete.

Bulk complete

After sending the follow ups, associate can mark them all as complete.

Bulk complete

After sending the follow ups, associate can mark them all as complete.

PROCESS & REASONS

Separating individual and group follow ups

I introduced tab on the follow ups screen for a clear distinction between associated generated and corporate generated follow ups. This way, the existing follow ups and actions can be left untouched and we can think about how to display grouped follow ups on its own screen.

Corporate generated follow ups are grouped

We worked together with our users to define how corporate generated follow ups should be grouped. Since the corporate office will be generating a set of follow ups with the same type and title, with the customer name being the only different attribute, we can use type and title as the variables for grouping follow ups.

Complete follow ups with just 1 click

After sending the bulk messages, the associate is prompted to complete the follow ups immediately, this way, they won’t forget to do it later on, which is something that happens often. We thought that adding the ability to select contact method and results would be a nice to have for tracking analytics.

Design Validation Findings

My PM and I conducted a usability test. We asked them to view their group follow ups and send an event invitation to a group and observed how they went about doing it.

Couldn’t navigate the tab menu

Some users needed a prompt to know how to switch to the group follow ups screen.

What about due dates?

Corporate offices want to put emphasis on when follow ups are due so that associates can take action on them accordingly.

Results for follow ups don’t make sense

Every user tester mentioned that adding a result for a follow up doesn’t make sense since we won’t know the result until later.

Changing the layout of follow ups

In my previous design, I didn’t consider corporate follow ups that only have 1 customer and where that would fit. I iterated on the framework put all follow ups together on the existing screen and differentiated the follow ups through labels. Grouped follow ups will now have a number identifier to show that there are multiple follow ups within its card.

FINAL DESIGN

Viewing follow ups

Follow ups are now grouped together on the existing screen with a number indicator for grouped follow ups. When clicking a group follow up card, the associate can see all of the users they need to reach out to.

Sending mass messages

Associates can select multiple clients and send a message via email or SMS. They can utilize the existing templates or create their own.

Mark as complete

After sending messages, associates can immediately mark the follow ups as complete by select the contact method and leaving a note.

Learnings and Impact

Talking to everyone

There was a lot of cross-functional collaboration involved that wasn’t outlined in the case study - with every update made, we validated our solutions with the sales, CS, and lead the engineers, we consulted our users for feedback and overall I was able to get input from people outside of my direct team. It helped with validating my assumptions, reducing internal disagreements and ensuring that the approach makes our users happy.

Opportunities outside design

While it was bittersweet that the PM left midway, I got the opportunity to take on responsibilities outside of what I’ve been currently doing. It was a lot of pressure on me to keep this project flowing while we were approaching a tight timeline with code freeze coming up. I completed the project brief for our cross-functional teams and broke down the requirements into the different haves, explaining what is required for each feature. It was also a great opportunity to work closer with the devs and gave me a better understanding and appreciation for the scoping work they do.

COLLABORATION

Let's include the SWE early on

COLLABORATION

Let's include the SWE early on

COLLABORATION

Let’s include the SWEs early on

We consolidated the research findings and included the software engineers in our brainstorming session to give them ownership of the solution and to get technical input early on.

We did a session of crazy 8s and decided on what flows we should work on. By the end of this conversation, we have an idea of our appetite, what are the must-haves, should-haves and nice-to-haves.

Collaborating with our users

Tulip’s roadmap is heavily influenced by the problems our users face so to determine the value of this feature request, we set up a couple discovery calls to take a deeper dive.

Questions asked

What we found was that