Supplier Insights
Together With is a workspace that empowers our colleagues and suppliers. It provides insight and access to the full Sainsbury's ecosystem of services and data.
Overview
Together With is the front door to suppliers entering their working relationship with the Sainsbury's group. It holds all the information and data needed for suppliers to get setup to start trading with Sainsbury's. There was a lack of a clear product roadmap to develop the product and continue to increase engagement.
Research was conducted to understand the real user needs and the opportunity for the business to develop this platform further. Delivered a host of recommendations to mature the product and successfully gained an increased annual budget from commercial investment teams to continue to develop the product to meet Sainsbury's strategic initiatives.
Roles
- User Research
- UX/UI Design
- Service Design
- Product Strategy
Duration
12 months
The challenge
The real challenge for the team before I joined was that the business was not high in confidence in the product and longer term strategy. We needed to prove what value Together With could provide to our Suppliers and Colleagues in the future and how it could benefit the wider business.
• The current content and features were not engaging suppliers and colleagues in depth with the average session length for 85% of users sitting under 8 seconds
• A lack of a clear product development roadmap with a history of reacting to business asks that do not truly improve the user experience
• Our users are provided with a host of platforms and tools the real challenge was to understand how we can progress the platform so that it can be a part of their regular workflow
UX Audit
Experience Architecture
Firstly it was important to understand the product architecture in detail to gain a view of the capabilities and features as well as current applications and permissions that were setup for user groups.
User Behaviour
To review how users were currently using the product, understand engagement with certain features and overall session length for key journeys to see which areas have the scope for the largest improvements.
Metrics Survey
Built and released a user survey to gain baseline metrics that would be used as a foundation to measure the experience as we developed it over the coming year, recording CSAT as our main metric.
Measuring success
In order ensure we are able to track how the improvements in the experience are received by the users we recorded some baselines that would be regularly tracked against quarterly moving forward through intercept surveys and integrated analytics.
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CSAT of Together With = 54%
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User adoption rate = 34%
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Avg session length = 7.4 seconds
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Avg time to register new users = 1.5 days
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Avg time to onboard a new company = 9 weeks
Research
Led a large qualitative research study that involved interviewing 32 users from a range of roles and product areas in order to gain a true representation of user needs. Through understanding these and current platform pain points a range of recommendations would be provided to iteratively evolve the product.
Study objectives
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To build an understanding of users current pain points on the Together With platform
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To understand the differences in users needs across multiple trading and supplier roles
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To find out what future data insight would be valuable for our users
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To identify the queries and challenges our internal support teams face to increase self service
Monetisation opportunities
It was discovered that we were sharing supply chain and promotions data to our suppliers as the business did not have the resources to build an offering that could at one point create a freemium model from. The main recommendation here was that we had a high level of supplier engagement on the platform and could now begin to offer this data in two formats within a reporting capability in Together With.
Design & Development
The following features were designed and developed in order to provide the engineering teams with a detailed backlog which was initially missing when joining the product team.
Lifecycle Map
All insights and observations were mapped across a lifecycle map to gain a clear picture of a suppliers journey during their relationship with Sainsbury's. This served as a valuable document to align product managers from a variety of domains to help support user centric requirements that would really provide value and improve their experience with our products and services.
Feature development
One of the main features I built out was the ability for suppliers to update and maintain their data in a company profile. The main benefit to Sainsbury's was this would reduce a heavy administrative task today and move the reliance on Suppliers to self service reducing our operating costs.
Also with Brexit requirements upcoming we needed the capability in the product to request our Suppliers to give us new information on a regular basis that was recorded in a single place to improve our data integrity.
Data maintenance
Hypothesis driven testing
The feature was released and measured over a 4 week period, initial benchmarks were recorded from the analytics and our databases to see how much information we had on record for each supplier in different data segments.
Together With
The following features were built and implemented into the product as a result of the discovery and recommendations that were given. Reviewing our metrics after 2 months of the new features being released the folowing results were recorded:
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CSAT of Together With = 54% / Post = 72%
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User adoption rate = 34% / Post = 83%
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Avg session length = 7.4 seconds / Post = 8.8 seconds
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Avg time to register new users = 1.5 days / Post = 15 minutes
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Avg time to onboard a new company = 9 weeks / Post = 2 weeks
Key learnings
- Challenge stakeholders on overall product vision to align the full team from the off
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Do not be afraid to admit that they have been some failures, its key to reset and move on whilst continuing to measure our progress and learn (News hub)
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Ensure the foundations are in place before multiple feature development starts (A/B testing capability, navigation, help & guidance)
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Communicate with wider teams on the longer term strategy early on to help with engagement and technical setup