Cisco Commerce Workspace
Simplifying B2B Buying Experience
Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) is a 21-in-1 Enterprise commerce platform designed to simplify quote, configure, and order Cisco products and services. However, Disorganized workflows, inconsistent visuals, and overwhelming information led to frustrating partner and reducing revenues.and user frustration.
Overview
Challenge
Slow deal cycle completion due to cluttered and overwhelmed user interfaces
Goal
Reduce deal cycle times and improve user satisfaction
Result
Partners produce five times as many quotes, complete deal cycles three times faster, and increase their productivity by 95%
My Role
As the Lead UX/UI Designer and Project Manager, I lead and design along with cross-functional team to create a cohesive, user-focused platform for CCW. Through research, iterative designs, and stakeholder collaboration, My team and I delivered solutions to improve productivity and reduce deal cycle times.
Challenge
Cisco Commerce Workspace were grappling with inefficiencies that preventing their Enterprise partner’s productivity and success rates, which data shows that it takes days if not weeks to complete a deal cycle. The existing configure, price, and quote (CPQ) solution, intended to simplify the sales process, overwhelmed users. The experience was fragmented, inconsistent, and filled with error-prone processes. This scattered landscape not only impacted sales efficiency but also jeopardized the customer experience, highlighting the urgent need for a thorough redesign of Cisco's sales infrastructure
Business Goals
Create a cohesive experience for user to go from Estimate, Quote, Configure, and Order within CCW
Reduce the Deal Cycle Time
Research
In our exploration of the CCW tracks, we engaged with stakeholders, sales teams, and partners to gather valuable insights. We discovered that 90% of partners feel overwhelmed by choices, while only 10% appreciate the platform's full customization options. Additionally, onboarding training for internal users is both time-consuming and costly. Users lack clear progress indicators, as tabs are often misused as progress bars, leading to confusion. Features are frequently duplicated with different names, interactions, and interfaces across CCW tools. Through a journey mapping exercise, we identified key personas along with their goals, expectations, and pain points, which revealed significant inconsistencies within the existing CCW tracks that we need to address.
Empathy Insights
90% of partners are overwhelmed with contents at any given moments.
Insights Challenge to complete task and making decisions
Partners take weeks/months working on a deal
Insights Users may abandon tasks or make errors if they feel overwhelmed due to cognitive overload
No clear progress trackers where users are
Insights Users are not confidence to complete tasks or abandon due to frustration
Repetitive features with different names and experiences between CCW tracks
Insights Reduce efficiency and productivity between tracks
Ideate
With our user insights, we teamed up with all CCW teams to brainstorming for solutions and foster an Agile work culture. We simplified existing features by creating a unified design system, aiming for consistency and faster development. Our goal? To help partners navigate CCW tracks more easily with familiar design patterns and content, ultimately speeding up task completion. We also developed wireframes to address key issues we uncovered. Here are some design opportunities we identified:
Outcome
We thoroughly tested our solutions with partners and internal sales teams, using Cisco's Task Performance Indicator (TPI) tool for A/B testing to fine-tune our approach. The revamped CCW platform delivered impressive results: partners saw up to 25% productivity gains with shorter deal-to-order cycles. By consolidating 21 Commerce tools into one platform, we sped up bookings and boosted efficiency. The new system also achieved a 3x faster deal cycle, 5x more quote generation, and 85% of customer interactions handled by an AI chatbot. These improvements significantly enhanced both partner productivity and customer experience in the B2B buying process.
3x
Faster Deal Cycle Time
5x
More Quotes Enhancement in Partner Productivity
85%
of All Customer Interactions Powered by AI Chatbot
What I Learned
The project's success was dependent on a comprehensive approach that combined deep user research, collaborative ideation, and iterative design processes to create a cohesive and user-centric B2B platform. By focusing on streamlining complex processes, developing a design system for consistency, and constantly validating solutions through testings, the team was able to achieve significant improvements in deal cycle time, partner productivity, and customer interactions. This project showcases how crucial it is to align UX strategy with business goals, emphasize the value of cross-functional collaboration, and leverage data to make successful enterprise-level solutions.
