To better assist sales people with their day to day tasks, payment and invoicing can be a large hassle and take up a large amount of time. How can a platform offer a simpler solution without having users leave the platform for easier management of client billing practices?
Offer a completely custom API for Stripe Integration into the CRM platform for easier tracking, updating and sending of invoices to clients. This creates a "one-stop-shop" for all sales people to closely monitor their quarterly successes.
Since the sales people and their client currently use Stripe for their payment and invoicing needs, my research led me to answer the following questions:
1. How much time is invoicing taking and is it causing issues?
2. What information is the most important for both a sales individual and a client to know on an invoice?
3. How do they monitor or track current, past, and on hold invoices?
4. How does the sales team label their invoices?
5. How does Stripe currently use KPIs?
METHODS + PROCESS:
• Stripe KPI Research
• Developer Conversations
FINDINGS
While using Stripe is still an important part of for the company, the company wanted to make it easier on their sale people that reported having to go back and forth from their CRM to Stripe was a pain and caused more issues when tracking and monitoring their accounts.
After researching their current process and how we can streamline it, I came to these finla conclusions:
NEEDS
1. Full transparency of all invoices in, out, on hold and overdue.
2. Easy navigation of the invoices that focuses on client and labels.
3. Filtering invoices by labels.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
1. Quarterly viewing for sales individuals but full overview for managers.
2. Full dashboard for high level overview so that sales individuals do not have to go to billing to see their clients' statuses.
Working directly with the product manager, a set of specs was established to simplify and offer sales individuals a streamlined invoicing system within the CRM.
We chose to create a separate menu item specifically for billing purposes. This would not only have a high level overview of the current quarter, but it would also have all of their invoices in one place. Each sales individual would only see their own clients while the sales manager would be able to see everyone on their sales team.
As the entire product was already built, there was no need to continue in low fidelity mockups so I began right away with a full prototype. To keep the user in mind, I continued forward by creating the simplest form possible for creating invoices. After sharing within our development team, the feature was deemed unnecessary for user testing and interviews.
After researching and studying Stripe APIs and the users who needed a simpler way to create invoices, this prototype was incredibly fun to design, build, and execute. While this may be a simple design, it exceedingly increased the user experience by offering a better solution to an awkward problem. In the future, I would like to conduct more user interviews and potentially work directly with Stripe's CX team to develop and create an even better and more streamlined feature.
