Grow engagement integrating CX journeys

How a CRM, marketing email automation, and go-to-market toolkit redesign increased sales and user engagement & retention by 50%.

Challenge:

A B2B research and corporate relations business cannot scale and sees decreasing customer engagement. The client business unit provides B2B annual research project partnerships, executive education, and professional development for people working in medium to large enterprises. They target managers and executive-level logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing participants. Technological and industry changes drive increased demand for education and upskilling within these companies. With a solid reputation and product offering, the group began to be unable to drive new business and meet existing customer demand.

Website interaction was comprised of a single web form and follow-up email. Go-to-market materials were dated in appearance and largely emailed as pdf attachments after prospects had expressed interest. The CRM instance and web interface were becoming outdated and did not meet competitive standards. The marketing email was delivered in a separate system. Billing and payments were issued manually in a separate system. Reporting was manual based on individual exports from multiple systems. There was confusion about who was responsible for which aspects of a customer’s journey.

Stakeholders

Customers and their business units, client business unit, executive leadership, and finance team.

Role

Digital and events experience product owner, and service design lead.

Collaborators

Marketing, program, and finance teams, and contractors

Methods

Journey mapping
Jobs to be done
User shadowing
User stories
Agile design sprints
User testing
User training
A/B testing

Solving for simplicity, consistency, and transparency

Redefine target audience value proposition and update all materials according to brand standards. Integrate CRM, automated email communications, and transactional billing for a seamless customer experience. Provide robust in-application reporting for staff and the production team.

Results

Increase in number of customers engaged annually

Marketing materials downloads in the first year

Increase in email open and response rates

Decrease is billing processing time

Results were driven by first empathizing with stakeholders. We interviewed staff and customer users. We shadowed users and surveyed customers on existing interactions. We maintained a ‘dream journal’ shared document to ideate future scenarios and processes desired from the system. We created a business process and stakeholder journey map to understand product discovery, engagement, and delivery from all viewpoints. We prioritized ideations into 165 user stories that would guide our software and marketing collateral design principles, ultimately leading to a fully integrated CRM.

Events and webinar production doubled within the first two years using roughly the same amount of staff resources. New qualified lead generation and email content interaction grew between 25 and 30% per year. This ultimately led to sales growth across products

Design Principles

For the staff user, the solution should be integrated, efficient, automated when possible, secure, easy to learn, and intuitive. For the end user, the solution should illustrate the brand’s quality, reduce friction, and supply user-centered touch points for engagement and data sharing.

Software

Salesforce Lightning, Blackthorn, Campaign Monitor, Figma, Stripe, Jira, MS Office, Drupal, Adobe XD.

Service Blueprint Simplified