SWETHA RAMASWAMY

Chatbots for the sales workflow | The vision

Act as an intelligent personal assistant for the sales representative, offering information in context.
The SAP design team wanted to understand how a chatbot could augment a salesperson’s workflow. To enable this, I conducted concept tests with 5 external sales representatives. The study revealed opportunities for the team to build into the next release of the SAP Sales Cloud mobile app.
Team: Researcher (myself), Designers, Product Managers, engineers
My role: Stakeholder interviews | Participant recruitment | Concept tests of chatbot design | Journey mapping | Present findings

The Problem

The sales funnel involves many steps after a lead is qualified and ready for the salesperson to take on. These steps primarily involve getting customer information, doing research and making sure the right product is sold.
Salespeople, however, perform many administrative tasks that takes upto 30% of their time, is considered burdensome and does not tap into existing intelligence.
CoPilot seeks to decrease friction in the sales funnel, allowing reps to do what’s most important – selling.

Business Goals

The Sales representative

Secondary Research and finding the right target segment

Secondary research provided a wide sample of sales representatives, which after consulting with the design team was narrowed down to the B2B sales representative representing a large company, with high value deals.

About the study

Concept tests + interviews with 5 external sales representatives, for 1 hour each.

The study set out to explore how salespeople would interact with a chatbot in the context of customer research/ demonstrations & follow ups. These are typically activities that involve pulling in information from many different sources.
  • What expectations do salespeople have while interacting with a chatbot?

  • What tasks do people perform in the context of nurturing a lead?

  • What information would people like to have?

  • What usability issues do people face while interacting with the app?

  • How do salespeople plan for meetings?

Insights : Journey Map

We learned that the the process of interacting with customers can be broadly split up into three stages:

Insights from usability tests

In addition to uncovering new opportunities, the concept tests revealed areas of improvement within the current design.

Impact

The design findings have been incorporated into the SAP Sales Cloud mobile app that is currently in beta.
Image Credits: https://appadvice.com/app/sap-copilot/1382827199
Key metrics for this products success include:

Goal Completion Time

The chatbot will decrease time to access information from the CRM and result in time/cost savings.

Active Users/Total messages sent

This will determine the value users gain from using the chatbot- if their queries are answered and information is relevant.

Reflections

This was my first project related to bots. The project had a lot of ambiguity to it as bots have only recently begun offering potential within the enterprise context.
It was challenge to introduce users to a bot, since they hadn’t interacted with one before. As with all new products, it will be a while before a significant behavior change is noted.
If I were to do this project again, I would observe users in their natural context and use a wizard of Oz research method, rather than an interactive prototype. This could reveal the choice of words users would use.