Job hunting and candidate placement is big business, and for companies like CareerBuilder, it’s a global business. CareerBuilder is not only one of the oldest online human capital solutions companies; it’s also one of the most successful, operating in more than 20 countries and connecting millions of employers and candidates each year.
To help manage its meteoric growth, CareerBuilder purchased and installed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. In addition to managing customer data, its sales leaders also hoped it would help them manage contract workflows and processes across the company’s 60 global markets. CareerBuilder’s process was unique, and they needed a solution that would match that process.
A new CRM doesn’t fix all problems.
When a solution doesn’t match the unique process of its users, productivity and adoption suffer. As users, we expect new technology to make operations faster, more intuitive, and more efficient. When we don’t get all of these benefits, the technology feels less useful and any gains we initially realized quickly fall out of favor. That’s the situation many organizations, like CareerBuilder, find themselves in after installing a complex CRM.
In CareerBuilder’s case, the new CRM did offer some immediate benefits, but the process of establishing new contracts in the CRM system was onerous and cost salespeople time and effort. Rather than spending time with customers and prospects, salespeople spent time searching for data that existed across multiple tabs, switching back and forth between screens, consulting pricing guides, and manually inputting product names and codes.
On the back end, during new contract creation, the existing system required constant data retrieval from the ERP core, via JavaScript. The constant back and forth information flow slowed down contract creation processes while the lack of opportunity mapping meant there was no information available to help sales recognize additional upsell or projection information. The user experience did not match the exact process of its users, and this resulted in potentially millions in lost revenue opportunities.
Better apps start with the humans who use them.
As evidenced in the example of CareerBuilder, even if you design an attractive app that meets IT requirements, if it doesn't work for and delight users, the app won’t succeed. Your design and development must evolve around the people for whom you’re building the app. When the system functionality doesn’t match the users’ processes, you introduce inefficiencies that slow users down. Lower employee productivity also translates to higher operating expenses due to time wasted and increased training efforts.
The key to designing delightful products for our users is taking time to define what they know and how they think, and doing whatever we can to make our designs fit within that. This methodology is known as human-centered design (HCD). The human-centered design process helps us understand business problems, user needs, and technical constraints in order to surface the most apparent solutions. Then, testing those solutions with users and rapidly improving them based on their feedback helps you create apps and systems that actually solve user problems. When you listen to users, managers, executives, and technology experts, you craft a solution that’s usable, desirable, viable, and feasible, resulting in adoption and high ROI.
Order Builder, more than just a contract management front-end.
CareerBuilder needed a solution to streamline the contract management process while giving the sales organization a better user experience to promote adoption and help provide visibility into current and future sales opportunities.
Having already used Skuid internally for other business applications, the team scoped out the requirements to rearchitect contracts management using low-code and realized it was not only possible but that the process would take less time and require significantly fewer internal resources than trying to customize the CRM using traditional methods.
Just eight short months later, Order Builder launched. In addition to a streamlined and more friendly user interface, the new system boasts several upgrades. The new front-end can call and store more information from the ERP system in real-time. This allows for significantly faster response times and the ability to make strategic decisions about factors such as discounting, pricing adjustment “what ifs,” and country-specific add-ons to increase the total contract value. Approvals are also tracked in real-time, giving sales reps and leadership insight into current deals and future pipeline.
The new solution gives salespeople complete control over each new contract. If they need to edit fields, they can. If they want to see how different option scenarios impact pricing, they can do that too instead of only having pre-selected options to choose from. And now, whenever the contract originator changes anything that impacts cost, the system automatically recalculates the variables and updates the contract, requiring less effort from sales and taking human error out of the equation.
CareerBuilder and Order Builder, a solution that just works.
So much of a technology’s ultimate success lies in proving its quantitative benefits. Did it help generate revenue, either directly or indirectly? How many employee-hours does it save? What are the maintenance and upgrade costs compared to other options? This is undoubtedly good data to have.
While Order Builder has proven its quantitative benefits, its greatest strengths lie in less quantifiable, but equally important areas. One benefit is the dozens of hours salespeople get back each year not having to manually look up and enter data. Another benefit is the lack of frustration and stress and the actual delight a user feels when using the app. Perhaps the most important benefit is how the app helps salespeople build better relationships with customers.
Today, more than 175 sales reps use Order Builder, along with a team of success experts who keep track of contract renewals to make sure CareerBuilder doesn’t lose any existing customers. IT expects Order Builder to stick around for a long time and with the enhancements and changes submitted by its actual users, they’re confident it will continue delivering exactly what sales and success managers need for years to come.
Read CareerBuilder’s full story here.
To learn more about building and designing apps that delight users, read our eBook on accelerating Salesforce app dev and improving user experience.
