Customer Admin Portal (Released in Feb 2020)

Customer Admin Portal

"It takes months to get any configuration done for my business, but with this new tool I can do it in a matter of days now."

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Role

Manager and strategist

Challenge

SAP has an admin portal for customers to manage their customizations and an advanced admin portal for customer support agents to make critical changes for our customers. However, to make any changes, customers need to create support tickets and work back and forth with support services for those changes. Therefore, our customers were not happy with this process.

Leadership

As a design director, my role was to build a UX strategy for the Admin Portal by working with all the stakeholders, customers and empower my team to execute the strategy. Working with leaders in marketing, sales, delivery, product management, and engineering, my team and I identified the complete experience a partner or a customer goes through, starting from the day they purchase our product to the day their site is ready to use.

Our research uncovered a detailed picture of how various teams in the onboarding process were communicating, how they passed information from one group to another, and the technology or tools used in each step. We also uncovered breakdowns and gaps in the process.

Impact

These findings generated three new initiatives to solve the various aspects of the experience.

IMPROVED API

New API to decrease to to create a site from several weeks to few hours.

ONBOARDING FORM

Improved process to decrease time to setup the site from 4 month to few weeks

NEW ADMIN PORTAL

Self service admin portal for customers to manage their own customization.

Workflow diagram showing end-to-end customer experience

Customer onboarding

Self-service experience

Shared vision

The new Admin portal became one of our top priorities in 2019-2020. I worked with teams across the SAP platform and Application to create a shared vision aligned with the SAP strategy and goals.

Scalable solution

We used the Fiori design system for the first time in the platform team. Adopting this new design system was a big challenge as the design system was too generic and didn't have components for all the use cases. So, I led the team to design new re-usable and scalable features that could be used widely across our platform. We also ensured that our components are accessible. I have also written a medium blog titled "Why designs to accommodate people with autism is better for everyone" on accessibility.

Operational excellence

Design sprint

I introduced the design thinking method through five days design sprint. Design sprints helped the team collaborate on various features from the get-go and build a common consensus with all the stakeholders. In the process, I also trained our design methods to cross-functional teams.

Design delivery

I introduced UX Blueprint design spec to deliver our designs better and improved collaboration with parties such as Engineers, PMs, and the Solution management team. This increased the quality of our delivery and also reduced churns due to communication breakdowns. I have written a medium article on this topic to share this method with the broader UX community.

Planning

I worked with PMs and engineering leads and created a four-quarter road map to identify upcoming projects and better planning/resource allocation. In these planning meetings, I influenced them to focus on innovation along with tech debt.