Michael Lahens

UX Designer & Strategist

Closing a Deal

Or how to say “goodbye” to customers so they’ll come back.

TL;DR

Why

To close a deal, customers needed an archive of it. The ordering, producing, and opening of an archive was painful and expensive for everyone.

What

Built an e-commerce-like ordering experience, integrated staff-facing tools, and revamped automation engine to produce cheaper and better archives.

Problem

When deal makers complete their deals, they prefer and often are required to have a record of their deals that can live on in perpetuity. Our past solution used antiquated technology that made it near impossible to access.

The ordering process for our customers was extremely opaque, and the internal process to produce archives was error prone and expensive. We were also receiving poor customer satisfaction scores because we were still charging for deals even after customers thought they were closed.

Discovery

To get our arms around the problem, we started with some internal workshops that gave us a sense of the overall closing journey for an M&A deal. From there we sketched the most critical verbs of the journey and captured them as epics. This returned to this visual again and again when refining our roadmap and communication progress to the business.

A series of rough sketches that depict the most critical activities that our customers and internal staff needed to do in order to be successful.

With our roadmap in place, we needed to dive deep on different areas of the journey. We used a mix of customer interviews to better understand their needs, and on-site observations of our internal production facilities to understand the tasks associated with making archives.

The use of storyboards became critical in testing our ideas internally and externally, since so much of problem lived outside of a software interface.

A single panel comic of an M&A professional receiving a notification on their phone that their archive is out for deliver.

Solution

Based on what we learned, our solution took a three-pronged approach:

We updated the customer ordering experience to match conventions established by common e-commerce experiences. (eg: transparent pricing, order status updates, and order history)

The initial ordering view with detailed product explanations.
An reusable online receipt screen for order confirmation and history.

We built an internal facing order fulfillment tool and infrastructure that was more secure and less manual. From our observations we knew to build these responsively, as staff needed to reference order information when away from their workstations.

A responsive web-view for support staff interacting with an on-prem USB burner.
An internal tool that visualized and manage all archive orders.

We used a backwards-compatible file structure to make accessing the data on an archive easier without compromising on security. This innovation also allowed us to deliver archives via the cloud.

Flow diagram for mapping out the internal tools and processes, and how the new maps onto the old.
A flow diagram we made to help visualize all the intersecting pieces. Zoom in at your own risk.

Results

The infrastructure and streamlining of processes we put in place reduced production time down from 24 hours to about 9 minutes. The ordering experience saw a steady increase of orders and customer satisfaction after release, and opened the door for future unexplored revenue streams, such as hosted archives. Our archive technology eliminated the customer demand for physical copies in months, not years, in favor of online downloads.