7 bridges
Dispute management
Client
Industry
7 bridges
Logistics tech
Skills demonstrated
User research - Workshop facilitation - Product architecture
​- Complex journey mapping
7bridges had a new ‘Land and Expand’ strategy based around the audit product.
The team wanted to explore how we could improve and evolve the existing Audit product to deliver even more value to the customer with the objective of driving sales and increasing existing customer satisfaction.
7bridges had a new ‘Land and Expand’ strategy. The sales team had noticed that they were quickly and easily converting leads to sales by offering a low cost product feature called Audit, then upselling the customer to additional products.
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Research showed that audit provided some level of value to customers, but we knew that the feature required more to deliver real value to customers and generate sales.
01 The Challenge
02 The context
Audit was an existing product that helped streamline the customer’s invoice process by automatically ingesting logistic provider (LSPs) invoices.
The user benefit was;
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All their invoices discoverable in one place
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GL codes automatically assigned to charges (usually a lengthy manual process)
In addition to being a great, low-cost first step for customers, Audit also helped us collect valuable data from customers relating to orders, rates and invoicing patterns that could be fed into our data lake and work with AI.
03 The Approach
We needed to understand how we could use the audit feature to release more value to the user and drive sales. The key priorities that framed our approach were:
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1 / Quick to design, build and ship
2 / Build on existing audit product
3 / High perceived value (Time and ROI)
4 / A design that could be split into phases to test and iterate
5 / We would follow our new product development lifecycle process
04 My role
I was principal designer on this project with the support of the Head of Design and our Junior UI designer. My responsibilities included discovery and research and wireframing / wireflow mapping. In addition, i was responsible for overseeing the UI design whilst engaging with internal stakeholders along the way.
PRIORITISATION PHASE
05 User research
We ran user interview sessions with two sets of user personas:
1. Supply Chain Managers
2. Accounts payable
Objective
To understand the user's workflow when processing invoices, and highlight any pain points they were suffering that we could help solve.
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Approach
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We conducted 10 interviews and observation sessions, mostly in-person, with over zoom with a screen share.
We asked them 20 questions which related to everything from the software they used, what their overall day looked like down to granular steps taken to process invoices.
We also filmed and observed them doing their job and talking us through it.
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Output
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- Interview transcript and summaries
- User journey maps
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Findings
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We found there were many many pain points for users. The ones that appeared most frequently included:
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Very manual process with many invoices to look through and approve
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Different provider portals each with different logins and processes
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Lots of errors on invoices including incorrect charges and overcharges
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Mismatch in systems. E.g some users had rely on multiple different systems including email, Sage etc to pay just one invoice
DEFINITION PHASE
06 Design definition & discovery
My first priority was to dig into the data. I had a number of sessions with our data scientists to understand:
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What data we will have available?
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What data do we want users to see?
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What actions should they be able to perform?
I pulled out a list of all the information that could exist relating to an incorrect charge and a list of all the actions that could exist relating to the charge.
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I then turned the data points into a lo-fidelity user journey to understand the different possible workflows and requirements.
Findings included:
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Invoices generally contained a large of individual charge errors
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Grouping charges led to complexity
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A combination of AI and user input was required for MVP
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A solid filter and sort experience was key
REALISATION PHASE
08 Wireframes & wireflows
Once we had validated the user flow had a clear view of project definition, the next step was designing the low fidelity wireframes.
High fidelity wire-flow
At each stage of the design process i would present an update to the engineering and product team and new issues would need problem solving.
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Some of the more complex problems included:
Solution:
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- If users wanted to dispute multiple charges at the same time they would use a group selector tool rather than the filter drawer. Although not an ideal solution it would be sufficient for MVP and enable us to monitor usage and iterate.
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- We would include an ‘due to expire’’ icon against disputes to alert the user. If expired charges were already grouped, we would show a toast notification alerting them.
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Problem:
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- Restrictions on how charges could be grouped. For example they had to be grouped by the same provider.
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- Some providers had a time limit on when charges could be disputed. This meant that if charges weren’t disputed they would expire.
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REALISATION PHASE
09 UI Design
Next up, translating the wireframes to a detailed UI. I worked closely with our UI Designer throughout the wireframing and hand-off process.
The wireframes had surfaced the need for some new components. These needed extra attention and collabration during the handoff:​
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Double table rows
We introduced double table line as having the carrier name and account number across two lines was useful for legibility and easy scanning.
Radio buttons and selection feedback
The requirement for pagination and the ability for users to multi select items on multiple pages meant we needed to design a summary showing the number selected.
Complex data summaries & comparisons
Different Users needed to be able digest different sets to make informed decisions about whether to dispute flagged charges. Depending on the type of data
10 Impact
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A huge step forward for the audit product, this was a keystone feature that would is used by the sales team as a first approach when trying to land new business.
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Generation of a significant amount of new data ingests which held real value for 7 bridges.
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Disputing invoices was previously a manual service offered to some customers. Making it automated saved the CS team huge amounts of time and effort
11 The results
The data
​Too early to tell but the measurements for success include the following
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- Quantity of Audit sign-ups accompanied by reference to the dispute functionality
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- Value of credits received as a result of disputes raised on audit
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- Number of hours per client spent by CS managing disputes post vs pre audit.
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- Plans to do a customer satisfaction survey relating to the feature twice annually.
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Feedback from the client & stakeholders
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Really positive. This was one of the biggest feature roll-outs in a while. It strongly impacted the customer facing teams such as CS and sales.
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"A huge leap forward for our product that will directly impact our sales team's ability to drive leads"
Phil Ashton, CEO on an All Hands call
12 My retrospective
A complex project with a great outcome. Learnings and areas for future development include:
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A number of team high level stakeholders were brought into the project late. This meant that we were given new insights at a late stage and had to make a number of U-turns that slowed the project. In future I would aim to ensure all stakeholders with knowledge and sway would be involved from the start.
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All logistics providers have different approaches to disputes and mischarges. It would have been useful to have a solid understanding of the different approaches before the project.
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It would have been useful to have access to users after the design process as well as during the research period. We could have then tested and iterated on our prototypes.