Sales User Onboarding
Background
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One of the most unique aspects of the residential solar industry is the nature of sale — a deal isn’t truly closed until the system is installed and working. This makes the relationship between the sellers (or dealers) and installers important — neither party makes money if the job is not completed or properly installed.
As the largest residential installer in the U.S., Freedom Forever has exclusive partnerships with the Super Dealers of the industry — together they act as the sales arm for Freedom Forever.
This mutually beneficial relationship incentivizes Freedom Forever to support the Super Dealers with development resources, including bonus software products — like the Volt App.
The Previous Onboarding Experience for a Freedom (Solar) Pros Rep :
A Sales Manager recruits a new Sales Rep and send them a link to fill out forms and sign documents. The new rep is prompted to set up their Outlook account and asked to download the Pros App. From the Pros App they’re sent to Freedom Forever’s Portal to set up a user name and password, fill out outdated forms (answering questions they’ve already answered in the Pros system), then sent to another system to take training classes (setting up a new username and password) and then it’s back to the Pros App where they are asked to download more apps like Freedom Forever’s Volt and others.
Needless to say revamping this experience was long over due.
(Needless to say, revamping this experience was long over due.)
Process
For this project, I contributed as the lead product designer by:
Participating in discovery meetings and research.
Iterating through numerous designs.
Creating flow charts.
Designing the chatbot and writing the script.
Designing the final high fidelity designs.
Prototyping to demonstrate the animation pacing and rough interactions for the chat flow.
Final QA pre- and post-launch
Discovery included:
Meetings with the leaders at the Freedom (Solar) Pros Dealer (their name has been updated from Solar Pros as part of the deepening partnership with Freedom Forever).
Going through the experience as a test manager and test representative.
Meetings with managers and sales reps about their perceptions experiences.
Our goals and approach:
To create a more seamless experience that cut out any unnecessary or redundant steps and cut down on the time it would take.
To engage and inform the sales rep of the full process, showing the number of steps, including estimates of how long each step would take.
To set up pay and commissions correctly from the beginning and have those details feed seamlessly into Freedom Forever’s commissions tool.
To improve the recruiter’s experience (and in future enhancements, give them a tool to manage and track each recruit’s progress.)
The Final Designs
Recruiter Invite Form
New User Chatbot Onboarding
Instead of the disjointed, confusing, and cumbersome experience for a newly invited sales user, we now invite them to download one app and keep the experience in the app for the full process. Even though most steps require a third party we solved with an in app browser so the experience feels streamlined and seamless. They can also clearly see the steps, progress, and are provided information about how long steps take and what they’ll need before they start each one with their progress auto-saved along the way.
And best of all, they get to interact with Watts, making the normally tedious experience of filling out a form more engaging and delightful.
