“For much of 2020 and 2021, tech execs were focusing on short-term decisions and reacting to unforeseen shifts,” says Matthew Guarini, VP, Research Director at Forrester. “In 2022, they’ll shift back to solving longer-term challenges. The ones that do it best will leverage a customer-obsessed approach to technology that enables their company to quickly reconfigure business structures and capabilities to meet future customer and employee needs with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience.”
At Skuid, we call this kind of adaptation “app agility”—a process of continuous design, creation, and delivery of powerful apps that put humans at the center. The result is experiences that people love and adopt because the apps work like we do.
Key to creating apps that people love to use is combining the right tools with the right process. At Skuid, human-centered design shapes our process and informs everything we do.
Human-centered design focuses on asking the right questions to solve problems—who's involved, what needs to be done, what are the challenges, what systems need integrating, what's the desired outcome—to produce the best possible user experience (UX).
In today’s market, we believe that prioritizing UX for revenue, customer, and people operations is the fastest path to growth for your business.
In this piece, we’ll share how three organizations streamlined revenue, customer, and people ops processes, adapting to evolving business needs and delivering experiences that produced tangible results.
Revenue ops: How T-Mobile improved pipeline management, opportunity tracking, and forecasting
Steve Silver at Forrester says, “Data, dashboards, and reports — though abundant — often fail to answer critical business questions. Aim to develop a deep understanding of the needs of end users and stakeholders and shift to providing role-specific, context-sensitive, just-in-time business insights that improve performance across the sales organization.”
The role of revenue ops is to provide processes and tools that help sales organizations work more efficiently, freeing reps to build relationships and sell. It’s also critical to provide sellers and leaders timely data for making informed decisions.
That said, the more tools reps are expected to use, the less productive they’ll be. Complicated, disjointed workflows also produce unreliable data, which prevents accurate forecasting.
In a webinar with T-Mobile, Carolyn Kidder, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement, shared how the company created a one-stop shop for pipeline management, opportunity tracking, and forecasting called Strategy Builder.
Before this app, T-Mobile’s inside sales team had roughly eight places to track information on which customers were eligible for upgrade, what usage looked like, and which devices they had. With this tedious experience, reps weren’t updating Salesforce and were instead tracking information in spreadsheets.
Strategy Builder provided T-Mobile’s sales organization with an integrated console that matched unique roles across the business. It solved common sales challenges with a human-centered approach, helping reps be more productive. It did so by bringing all the data to users instead of expecting them to go find it in multiple tools.
After T-Mobile implemented Strategy Builder, quota attainment jumped to over 80% and new reps hit quota in their first quarter.
Customer ops: How Tapjoy streamlined its support workflow, speeding its process by 7x
According to Forrester, “Devoted customers will pay 50% to 200% more to stay with your brand.”
But in order to obtain devoted customers, you must provide them with a seamless experience. Skuid customer Tapjoy did just that when it overhauled its verified by advertiser (VBA) process.
Tapjoy is a mobile advertising company with monetization solutions for advertiser partners focused on creating the best consumer experience. In order to obtain weekly verification from advertisers, Tapjoy’s support team had to manually collect data in Salesforce, enter it into 50 separate spreadsheets, and email each advertiser for approval.
Input errors meant that consumers didn’t always receive their rewards and each VBA file took 3.5 hours to process. Using Skuid, Tapjoy created a single app to automate the workflow.
“The main focus during the app creation process was building a simplified user experience that integrated various Excel spreadsheets we had from Salesforce,” says Nikita Sang, Senior Operations Analyst at Tapjoy.
The result? The company significantly reduced human error and condensed a nearly 4-hour process down to just 30 minutes, improving both customer and employee experience. This approach, combined with other process optimization, also helped Tapjoy decrease its SLAs from one week to three days.
People ops: How the VA improved app accessibility and employee experience
Forrester predicts that “2022 will go down as the year executives were forced to care about EX.” We certainly hope so, because employee experience is just as important as customer experience.
When it comes to providing people with the systems they need to do their best work, accessibility is non-negotiable. When users of varying abilities can’t fully interact with your apps, they become demoralized, and you don’t get the data you need to make strategic decisions that drive growth. Plus, you risk losing valuable members of your organization.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) struggled with a critical employee application, Work and Time Reporting System (WATRS). With 14,000 users, WATRS had accessibility issues that prevented 508-compliance.
WATRS was originally built in Classic Salesforce then migrated to Lightning, and also had a dated UI. So, in addition to resolving accessibility challenges, providing a modern UX was paramount.
Skuid and Accenture Federal Services built and deployed the new WATRS app in just six months, bringing the VA into 508-compliance. The refined user experience in the new system added clarity and improved user efficiency.
We wanted to make the application as seamless and user friendly as possible. We were able to both add enhancements to WATRS and make it easier to use, too.
– Hanna Buchan, VA Senior Analyst
New app-building tools to help you streamline operations
Regardless of the ops challenges you face, Skuid can help. And our latest release, Dubai, includes features that provide even more leverage for tackling common rev ops, customer ops, and people ops problems and creating human-centered experiences.
Dubai includes:
- Fast navigation in Design System Studio.
- Ways to reduce user dependence on spreadsheets.
- The ability to match your styles with Lightning.
- And features that help you create more accessible apps.
Plus, there’s more to come this March. If you’re building apps outside of Salesforce, Dubai will include foundational changes to support app development and navigation, enhanced user permissions, and a supplemental database.
