Strategy for B2B2C Enterprise E-Commerce

Challenge:

Cisco's commerce experience has grown significantly over the decades, not just in revenue but also in a complex and fragmented system. Partners navigate multiple applications with inconsistent interfaces, leading to inefficiencies and frustration.

Problem Statement:

GOAL:

• Simplify navigation and user experience across applications

• Unify cross-platform experiences and data

• Enhance communication and feedback mechanisms

• Provide comprehensive and accessible metrics and data

• Streamline processes and reduce complexity

In summary, create a unified, seamless e-commerce experience that is guided, personalized, and data-driven that efficiently scales to meet the business needs of partners, customers, and Cisco.

My Role and Deliverables:

I was a UX Architect and Strategist on this project. My team included a Lead Product Designer and four UX Designers. Being a big advocate of UX Research, I worked closely with the UX Research team to guide and define the research. Moreover, I collaborated regularly with several stakeholders from engineering, business, sales teams, and SMEs. Below is a list of some deliverables for this engagement.

Deliverables:

• Orchestrating Research & Workshops

• Product Strategy

• Design Principles

• Journey Maps

• UX Architectural flows

• Information Architecture

• Use cases & Designs

• API Object Mapping

• Technical POC

Understanding the Complex Landscape of Cisco's Operations:

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the overall landscape was essential to tackling the intricacies of Cisco's commerce experience. This involved delving into the various processes, tools, and user experiences that shape the partner journey. To achieve this, I collaborated with UX Researchers to conduct:

• User Research Sessions: We engaged with partners to understand their pain points, workflows, and interactions with Cisco's current applications. It aided in identifying the partner personas, the differences between different tiers of partners, and their processes that are also based on the size of the business.

• SME (Subject Matter Expert) Sessions: I consulted with experts in specific domains to gain in-depth knowledge of the processes and tools used. These sessions highlighted the partners' critical issues in the current applications and business processes.

One crucial discovery was that the partner's role extends far beyond the initial purchase. Their involvement grows significantly in the post-sales phase, encompassing:

• Renewals: Partners are critical in ensuring continued customer satisfaction and loyalty through timely renewals.

• Up-sells: Partners identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell relevant products or services, driving revenue growth and customer success.

Along with learning about the current business tools and process, I also mapped the overall Cisco business units and product families to understand which CX services are involved in different business units. Below is the quick summary of Cisco product families.

This understanding has significant implications for the design of Cisco's commerce experience, highlighting the need for a seamless and supportive experience that empowers partners to excel in their roles.

Shifting from Tactical to Holistic: A New Approach to Problem-Solving

Before my involvement with Cisco and this project, the team was focused on addressing isolated issues through tactical solutions. While these efforts provided temporary fixes, nobody addressed the underlying complexities and interconnected challenges. Recognizing the need for a more comprehensive approach, I requested permission to step back, pause, and reassess the situation. This allowed us to:

• Re-evaluate priorities: Identify the most critical problems that need attention.

• Consider the bigger picture: Understand how individual issues connected and impacted the commerce experience.

  
  
  

A Unified Vision: The Kick-Off Guide

To ensure everyone was on the same page, I created a kick-off guide that:

• Outlined the fundamental problems: Clearly defined the challenges we aimed to solve

• Established a shared understanding: Ensured team members and stakeholders were aligned on the project's goals and objectives

• Provided a framework for collaboration: Set the stage for a cohesive and holistic approach to problem-solving

Systems Thinking Approach: Cisco Commerce Eco-system

By stepping back and reframing our approach, I tackled the complex challenges facing Cisco's commerce experience with a renewed sense of purpose and direction. By applying Systems Thinking principles, I created another artifact of the Cisco commerce eco-system. This was the turning point of the entire project as it helped align and get all executive stakeholders closer from their respective silos.

End-to-end Journey Mapping for Commerce

Once I had a basic understanding of the various components of the system, it was crucial to conduct a more detailed analysis to uncover the intricate details involved in delivering seamless end-to-end experiences. This entailed:

• Breaking down the user journey into distinct steps and tasks, revealing the complexities of the process

• Identifying the various touchpoints and interactions that customers have with the system, including digital and human interactions

• Understanding the diverse user groups involved, including their roles, goals, and pain points

• Examining the multiple applications and systems that work together to support the experience, including their integration points and data exchanges

• Analyzing the workflows, business processes, and technical dependencies that drive the system's functionality

• Recognizing the critical moments of truth and opportunities for delight that shape the user experience

By diving deeper into these aspects, I was able to develop a comprehensive understanding of the system's inner workings, identify areas for improvement, and design more effective, user-centric experiences that meet the needs of all stakeholders.

Storytelling and mapping future experiences

Later, I leveraged storytelling to unlock emotional connections in future commerce experiences. By crafting compelling narratives that weave together products, services, and experiences, I created wishful, immersive, and memorable interactions that drive engagement, loyalty, and alignment with the executives.

Design Principles: A User-Centered Approach

The culmination of the research efforts, including insights gathered from partner feedback and interviews, observations, and findings from user testing sessions, and a deep understanding of users' needs, pain points, and motivations, enabled us to distill the essence of the discoveries into Design Principles. These principles were the foundation for crafting a cohesive and user-centered experience, guiding our design decisions, and ensuring the solution addressed our users' needs and pain points.

Design Principles
These principles embodied the spirit of our research findings and user empathy, providing a clear direction for the design of the experience. They included tenets such as:

experience Architecture - Platform/Offer Agnostic Framework

As a UX Architect, I embarked on a comprehensive analysis of the underlying systems and structures that drove the commerce experience. This involved:

• Offer Structures: Examining the intricacies of offer creation, management, and presentation

• Back-end Systems: Understanding the inner workings of the systems that powered the experience

• Data Structure: Delving into the organization and relationships of the data that fueled the experience

First, I could connect the dots by adopting a holistic approach by identifying the relationships and interdependencies between these complex components. Second, I architected the flows to design a seamless and cohesive user experience agnostic of individual offers. This allowed the development of a framework to create a flexible and adaptable structure that accommodates various offers.

Visualizing Complexity
To facilitate understanding and communication among the design team, I created visual flows that Made it easy to comprehend the intricacies of the experience. I illustrated the user journey and Showcased the user's path through the experience, highlighting key touchpoints and interactions. This allowed me to ensure the design team was unified in understanding and approach to the experience.

By taking a holistic approach and creating visual flows, I was able to distill the complexity of the commerce experience into a clear and actionable design framework.

Building a Modular Information Architecture

The company's executive team decided to integrate the commerce experience into an already existing partner platform named PX Cloud. This decision was taken to provide a one-stop-shop experience for the partners. Since the commerce experience was a new addition to the PX Cloud, laying a solid foundation for its future growth and development was significant. A well-structured Information Architecture (IA) was deemed crucial to achieve this goal. I orchestrated multifaceted teams such as content strategy, UX research, and partner sales stakeholders through multiple rounds of card sorting and organization exercises. These collaborative efforts helped inform the IA, ensuring it was intuitive and user-centered.

Once we had the first draft of the IA, we conducted Tree testing (A/B testing) to evaluate the navigation and findability of content with the partners. This helped to validate the structure, capture feedback, and analyze the results to optimize the IA structure further. The updated IA now serves as a foundation for future design concepts, enabling the Commerce experience to:

• Scale up: Accommodate additional content and features without compromising usability

• Remain modular: This allows for easy maintenance and updates, ensuring the IA stays flexible and adaptable.

By investing in a robust IA, I created a solid base for the Commerce experience to grow and evolve, providing a better user experience for our customers.

building a roadmap based on business and customer value

I facilitated collaborative sessions with cross-functional teams to ensure our product aligned with strategic goals and user needs. These included UX researchers, business stakeholders, technical architects, and sales executive leaders. Leveraging a data-driven approach, we meticulously prioritized features based on their potential business impact and customer value relative to the required implementation effort. This comprehensive evaluation enabled us to categorize features into short, medium, and long-term initiatives, providing a clear roadmap for product development.

Prioritizing Use Cases, designing prototypes, and validation

As a lead, I guided the team in focusing on multiple use cases for Tier 1 (1T) partners. I ensured our design framework could scale up to accommodate a growing number of partners and users and support offer variations to handle diverse offer types, complexities, and customizations. I prioritized 1T partner use cases to create a robust and adaptable foundation for the Commerce experience.

Partner Validation through Design Prototypes: Ensuring Real-World Relevance

To validate our design decisions and ensure alignment with partner needs, I engaged with 1T partners in various settings. I presented the demos face-to-face at Cisco’s annual conference, which helped capture critical feedback. I also interacted with our partners by collaborating with our sales council and partner advocates. These in-depth talks and usability testing allowed me to Incorporate partner feedback and insights into our design iterations. It helped the team to validate the understanding of partner needs and pain points. Furthermore, it fostered strong relationships with 1T partners and sales council members, ensuring our design meets their expectations.

Bridging the Gap between Design and Development: Ensuring Technical Feasibility

After creating designs and Figma prototypes, it was essential to check the technical feasibility of our solutions and ensure that the logic aligned with the back-end infrastructure. To achieve this, I closely collaborated with the technical architects and developers to gain insight into the underlying data models and APIs. This understanding helped me map designs to back-end data to align our design components with the corresponding back-end data entities. This collaboration enabled me to identify potential technical debt and pinpoint areas where the design and back-end infrastructure might not align. It also allowed for optimization of front-end and back-end integration, resulting in a seamless connection between the user interface and back-end logic.

Overall, this exercise streamlined the development process and ensured a more efficient implementation of our designs.

highlights, Learnings, and Progress

By deeply immersing myself in user research insights, I developed a customer-centric approach that seamlessly integrated with cutting-edge technology solutions. This enabled me to streamline complex business processes and elevate the overall commerce experience. Guided by established design principles, I successfully enhanced key aspects of the customer journey, as illustrated below.

By taking a step back, being partner-centric, and guiding partners through complex flows, we can create a solid foundation for transformation. Then, by turning our designs into a technical POC, we can build confidence and collaboration, ultimately driving success for Cisco, our partners, and our customers.