Concept: Customer Journey
Challenge
Forcepoint struggled with a disjointed customer and user experience. Some of this was related to the market reality, decision makers, the roles that pay for the products, are not day to day users of the products.
The solution belonged to the sales and customer success organization, but I provided this concept to advice and bring the product experience into the conversation.
Approach
From a UX perspective we approached improving the customer journey with an approach catering to brand, key moments of truth and an ability to demo the value proposition without having to do a proof of concept.
Initial steps was taken with the product related flows, but the project never expanded into a broader, end to end, customer and user journey as Forcepoint was acquired.
Role:
Director of Global UA and UX.
Initial mapping of customer phases and key touchpoints.This mapping referred to touchpoints inside and outside product experience.
The foundational approach was "everything is product experience".
What is in the Customer Experience?
The customer journey mapping had to provide an end to end experience, from marketing, lead generation and maturing until customers renew with the product.
Some of the ideas explored were:
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Help and support documentation, aligned content strategy with marketing, including the "make me better at my work" approach
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Integrated licensing and other customer information
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Telemetry supported ticket creation
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Proactive product suggestions (product use, efficiency)
Mind map of tools, products, services, related projects and resources, tasks, elements and goals the customer journey could contain.
The Four Themes/Phases
The initial draft of the Forcepoint customer journey broke it into 4 distinct themes based on the different phases of the customer ownership journey.
Prospecting
For potential customers researching solutions. We looked at how to provide early and easy access to the product experience.
We made it clear to emphasize the different user goals, from a buyer to a security solution administrator. This mean balancing marketing and industry communication with more technical how tos.
The journey work also exposed the need for aligning terminology across legacy products, and especially, ensuring a common standards for the SaaS experience. Training and help documentation started to blend together.
With V3 of the design system the focus changed to using a new V1, Dynamic User Protection (DUP).
Unified onboarding
Goal was to inject more customer self-service in the overall experience. The vision was that the same infrastructure should be be used for both demo, proof of concept and potentially flow into onboarding.
This would remove the cost of maintaining multiple systems as well as assuring a smoother transition from proof of concept into production.
We worked towards a more advanced approach, allowing users to source the experience with their own data, which again would blur the line between demo, proof of concept and production.
First Time User Experience
Administrator and other user onboarding. First step in time to value.
Within onboarding, we defined 4 phases:
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Connect: Data pipe established
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Sandbox: Initial data flow, no setup, "Hello World" moment
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Test: Adapting and optimizing policies
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Go live: Show results
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Post sales: Showing ongoing value through enhancements and updates
Operational Excellence
Acquiring new customer in cyber security (as in most enterprise level software) is very expensive. Anything in the experience was to drive customers towards renewal.
Goal was to highlight solution benefits, proactively help user and customers maximize value proposition.
Sketching the Experience
After iterating on the flows, we started working out how we best could illustrate the core touch points, the moments of truth and hopefully create some moments of wow for the customers.
I did a lot of initial hand sketching and then collaborated with a Sr. Designer on getting the screens to a fidelity allowing us to communicate to the wider organization.
Prospecting: Customer looking for the right solution
The prospective customer (user) finds the relevant solution, either through organic search, marketing initiatives or other communication from Forcepoint.
Content strategy is important here. Marketing material has to be backed up by technical documentation. Even public help content, communities etc. needs to be part of a holistic approach to content marketing.
Unified Onboarding:Reuse but Optimize
Goal in the initial phase is to find a balance between getting the prospect into the solution while also capturing enough information to:
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Qualify the lead
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Capturing information to use in marketing and product experience
The profiling should allow a more personalized experience, aligned along the lines of both marketing and user personas.
First Time User Experience
Prospect user would be dropped into the solution area. Goal was to utilize the same infrastructure as if the user was a "real" customer.
One of the challenges in cyber security, of any data driven experience, is that it is hard to highlight benefits without representative data available.
The availability of data with a meaningful time dimension is important to show trends and outliers, as well as ensuring the data sources are connected correctly and policies are set up.
We worked from two scenarios, both customers bringing their own data as well as the availability of demo data.
Operational Excellence
Cyber security solutions are from an executive perspective a set and forget proposition. There is an unfortunate situation where the solutions are only visible when they break down.
Cyber security is always dependent on ongoing research, SaaS is continuous delivery - both should be made visible to both the technical and executive roles.
We spent time using user and anecdotal data from customer service on where these moments of truth could be highlighted in the experience.
We did not expect executives outside of cyber security to log into the solution without some nudging.
Monthly or quarterly status emails were explored as part of engaging with the decision makers.
Dashboard of Dashboards
Showing the value of the full platform was an interesting problem. We had a fairly broad scope of possible personas, from decision makers to technical leads.
We combined:
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System status
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Summary information from licensed solutions (actionable)
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Support overview and options
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Marketing information
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Jump to individual solution areas
Goal was to slowly break down the solution silos and expand the customer portal based on features, not products.
Mobile Aspect
From the ease of use perspective, we explored how the content could function in an app/responsive web design.
Main user would be the decision maker, likely triggered by a summary email.
Key Insights
All of the customer journey work was unfortunately not implemented. With new ownership the work was deprioritized. At the time of me leaving Forcepoint, the work was paused leaving this as a concept for now.
It does show the need to think broader as a SaaS provider and expand both brand and product experience, breaking down some of the traditional silos between product and customer success.