How AI could assist sales representatives in real time to improve interactions between them and clients.
Role
UX Designer
UX Researcher
Visual Design
Deliverables
UX Research
Design process
Usability Testing
User Flow
User Interface
Wireframes
High-fidelity prototype
Tools
Figma
Figjam
Miro
Trello
Link
RillaVoice
RillaVoice is a phone & tablet app that records conversations between sales reps and customers. Owners, managers, and sales reps can then review the recorded interactions. RillaVoice saves businesses time & money by allowing employers & managers to provide credible and effective feedback to sales reps without being present for each interaction.
Our team's task
Sales reps need many tools to improve their interactions with customers. Improved sales pitches and more closed sales can be beneficial to a company. Equipping reps with the right data as quick as possible improves the odds of them making a sale. Our client wanted us to find a way to give employees real-time feedback while interacting with a client and to conduct research to find ways sales reps could improve their pitches.
Our plan
Our process involves gathering data and making sense of it, from there we created & designed features that addressed sales reps issues. We tested our features and created a final product
Research
Synthesis
Ideate
Test design
Final
Product
How might we engage sales representatives with real-time feedback to help improve sales and customer interactions?
What sales reps had to say
My team and I interviewed 10 sales reps—5 reps who were Rilla Voice users and 5 sales representatives from other industries. We developed 17 questions along with a discussion guide. These questions were constructed in order to better understand sales reps and what they experience in their day-to-day customer interactions.
“Well, My supervisor comes out doing sales with me once in a while, I have to take advantage of the time I spend with her.” — Alicia
“its really important that the customer understands” — Brig
“getting more information about a product or product wise, I go straight to my manager or the owner.” — Brendan
Making sense of our data
My team and I made transcripts of our interviews and extracted common issues sales reps faced. From there, we proceeded to create an affinity map to group our insights from each interviewee. This allowed us to better visualize the needs of sales reps and what problems would be most beneficial to address. From the strongest themes of our data, we developed a hypothetical individual who would represent the collective sales rep perspective.
Meet Tim!
Goals
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Success in following his sales process—every step of the way.
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To ensure customers' satisfaction with their knowledge of the products' value and benefit.
Needs
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Tools that are intuitive to real-time situations and can help him navigate his sales process to ensure that it stays on track.
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Tools that provide real-time product knowledge to ensure the customers' comfort and familiarity.
Frustrations
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Getting distracted & losing focus during his sales pitch.
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Difficult questions regarding product knowledge.
Tim's Day
The Journey Map gives us a better understanding in detail about the different events that occur throughout Tim's day, along with what went positively and what went negatively.
How might we engage sales reps with real-time feedback to help improve sales and customer interactions?
Features we developed
By collecting user interview data and narrowing down the issues sales reps experience into our Tim persona & journey map, we had a better understanding of what sales reps needed. We concluded that users wanted easier ways to improve their pitch in real-time. They would often turn to managers for help & feedback on ways to improve but faced the obstacle of their managers' unavailability at times. We needed to create features that addressed these concerns.
Beginning our design process
My team and our client started our design process with a design studio session. We had two rounds of hand-drawn templates to plan out the features we had in mind. Our client contributed input on the features that were most important to his vision.
Features we came up with
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A way for sales reps to improve their customer interaction skills
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Notifications on tips for communicating with the customer effectively.
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Immediate feedback after a customer interaction for quick improvement.
Our first design
We developed our first mock up design on Figma
Testing our design
We developed a discussion guide along with three tasks for users to complete to help us gather data on how users reacted to our features. The guide would allow us to figure out what aspects we needed to improve for our final design.
Iterations
We improved the aesthetic of the main menu, pre-sales prep page, and live recording feature, as well as notifications for sales reps to receive during client interactions.
Final design
After conducting five initial usability tests, we iterated on our design to create a hi-fidelity prototype as a feature addon to a fully functioning app.
Final design testing results
Our final design yielded good results when it came to users finishing their tasks, there was a slight increase for the time for completing a task but it was mainly due to the AI real time recording feature.
Take aways
Being part of such revolutionary idea was a privilege to experience. In the end our client was very happy with our features and their designs. My team and I experienced difficulties communicating with our client due to his busy work schedule, I learned from this experience that in UX you have to move forward, be flexible and understanding of others.
I worked in retail in the past and the idea that Rilla voice provides would have helped me so much with closing sales and being informed and confident about my knowledge on the floor. Again I’m thankful to be part of this project, it taught me so much in every aspect of the UX process as well as learning to work with teammates and clients.