Rethinking Our Enterprise High-Touch Purchase Journey: a Service Design Case Study
Overview
In early 2020, as Atlassian was accelerating its growth to the cloud, one of our key focuses was on our enterprise customers (who make up more than half of our revenue consistently). We had to make sure our products' capabilities meet their needs and as importantly, our customers need to know about it and have a confident path to adoption. While the product and platform teams focused on the former, my buyer experience team along with marketing and sales operation worked closely together on the latter to ensure a successful end to end customer journey for our biggest customers–both new and existing.
This is an exploratory project that lasted for 4 months with the goal of identifying key customer experience improvement opportunities for our largest enterprise customers when it comes to purchasing our software. Towards the end of the year, it was stress-tested with two major announcements to our enterprise customers: the ending of our server business as we’re going all in for the cloud and the launch of our new Cloud Enterprise plan for Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence.
Role and Team
As this project touched on different parts of the business, I didn’t have a “fixed” team throughout. My main partners in crime in this whole project was a product manager in the buyer experience team whose focus is on our enterprise strategy and a project manager who helps us with all the coordination. Then our bigger working group included stakeholders from the marketing, demand gen, sales operation and web technical teams.
Problem space
Since its early days, Atlassian has been known for its “no-sales-team” marketing model. Relying heavily on the website as well as a strong community of champions, this strategy has worked well for almost the first 10 years. Then, when our customers grew to a substantial size and new large customers were considering our products, they both expected a more traditional high-touch “white-glove” experience to make sure all their questions are answered and help is instantaneous. As a result, for the past 6 years, there has been a duel-experience for our software buyers: self-serve for smaller customers and high-touch for enterprises.
Even though this new model seems to work well for either a very small team who doesn’t require lengthy conversations with a sales rep or a very large organization where working with sales in a must-have, a good amount of our new and existing customers fell in the in-between gap for being not too small but not too big either. They want efficiency of self-service while expecting some hand-holding to make a sound purchase decision.
In early 2020 as Atlassian’s main business goal was to migrate existing customers (from server) and land new customers into the cloud, we were planning to introduce the comprehensive Enterprise plan to our 3 core cloud products Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence later in the year. Our Buyer Experience team saw this as a prime opportunity to rethink how we can improve the purchasing experience for our enterprise customers.
Approach
Since the purchasing experience for our enterprise customers require both high touch (interacting with our sales team) and self-service (interacting with our web pages) in addition to other various interaction touch points, our team decided to approach this exploratory project using the service design methodology. Our goal was to identify short-term and long-term opportunities to improve the overall experience for both the customers as well as to optimize the internal process for our internal sales/marketing teams.
Process
Research
After a kick off meeting and several follow-up conversations to understand the business goals of this project, we started the first stage of research which would include customer interview, supporting insight gathering and stakeholder interview.
With the help from our Research & Insight team, my product manager and I had the opportunity to talk to 12 enterprise customers (7 Atlassian customers, 5 non) of different company sizes to deeply understand their software purchasing experience. Since product evaluation and purchases at this scale is often complex and cost-driven, most of our participants had a leadership role in IT or development. We got a lot of useful insight out of these conversations. The top 4 takeaways for us were:
Having a dedicated person (and ideally the same) from Atlassian to work with them throughout the process is critical
How can Atlassian help buyers make a stronger case when presenting to their leadership?
Before even talking to a sales rep, how can Atlassian help provide more relevant information for the buyers?
Atlassian pricing can be quite complicated, especially when multiple products and instances are being used. How can Atlassian help buyers understand the breakdown more effectively?
In parallel, we also met with several key stakeholders who involved in various touchpoints of the buying process for our enterprise customers to gain insight into how they operated, what pain points they experienced and any additional user feedback they could share with us. The 6 stakeholders we spoke to were under Product Marketing, Sales Operation, Customer Lifecycle Marketing, Technical Account Management and IT Services.
Alignment on archetypes and design principles
As this exploratory work for the buying journey started, other work streams within the new enterprise plan program also picked up momentum. This gave me the opportunity to align with other product designers (security, admin, Jira, Confluence, growth, commerce, support) on how to approach the end to end experience more holistically. We held a workshop to share insight and started to form the 3 main archetypes of our enterprise customers.
Product admin of a small team or orgs with less than 100 employees
IT manager, IT admin or finance for a rapidly growing org from 100-250+ employees
IT leaders, IT admin, SecOps, finance, product admin for orgs with 1000+ employees
Then, as a working group, leveraging the shared insight, we also came up with key design principles for our various work regarding enterprise customers.
💪 Unbreakable at any scale: Everything that we do is stress tested to work for our largest and most complex customers as well as our smaller and simplest. Factors: performance, availability, maintenance, predictability, usability.
🎛 Control & Delegation: Provide the capabilities (not rules) to shape user behavior to build a secure work environment.
💬 Trust and relationships: Elevate trust from end to end whether it’s digital or human interaction
Service blueprint mapping
With all the useful information I gathered from the research stage, I spent two weeks overlaying them over the service blueprint - which is an essential component of the service design methodology. A service blueprint provides visibility beyond what the customer sees (front stage) into how operationally things are done to deliver that experience (back stage). When looking at the entire journey with different layers, gaps and opportunities started to emerge. I used Mural to construct this blueprint.
Screenshot of our Mural service blueprint
Over the next few weeks, I met with the key stakeholders to validate the information on the blueprint and discuss opportunities. These opportunities later will be transferred to a Confluence page so that it can be socialized easier.
Socializing and roadmap planning
Once the blueprint was in a good stage (reviewed by key stakeholders), my PM and I shared it with several teams across the org with the main goal of creating visibility into the end to end process of how long and complicated an enterprise buying journey could be. This visibility would lead to conversations on how teams can partner up and improve the experience without silos.
Within our Buyer Experience team, we used the opportunities from this exercise to plan and prioritize our roadmap. Some of the key initiatives that came out of this exploratory work were:
- Enterprise site redesign to improve usability and content navigation**
- Contact sales form re-design and routing experience
- Interactive assessment to kick-start the buying process
- Interactive live conversational experience
- Content investment in enterprise customer stories through various medium
Result and impact
As a service design project, the key results of this effort were:
A service blueprint was used as a working source of truth artifact for several teams across Atlassian
Gaps in the customer journey as well as in the internal process were discovered and translated into actionable opportunities for several partnering teams
**8 months after this service design effort was concluded, I also led the redesign effort to our key Enterprise pages with improved information architecture and visuals. As a result, we saw an 11% increase in quality enterprise leads that contacted our Enterprise Sales team which led to more closed deals at the end of FY22.
When Atlassian rolled out the Cloud Enterprise plan in February 2021 to the general public, the service blueprint from this project was utilized to a great extent and I helped run subsequent workshops for educational purposes.
Learning and key influences:
Getting my feet wet and comfortable with applying service design
Constant and effective communication with teams of team
Became more efficient in decoding complicated process via insightful inquiry