Trust Distribution
Designing a B2B ecommerce platform
Trust Distribution are one of the UK’s largest distributors of communications and IT products and services.
I led the design of their new B2B ecommerce site and a self-service user account system. Working closely with teams at Trust I was responsible for experience strategy, ideation, user experience and design.
The Challenge
Trust needed a solution that could support their evolving business and expanding user based. Our aim was to deliver a platform that seamlessly integrated with their Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, offered a great ecommerce experience, and laid a solid foundation for the future.
Our goals:
Working closely with the teams at Trust we defined our goals based on the needs of both their customers and the people supporting them, which were:
- Create a personalised and intuitive shopping experience.
- Provide self-service account and user management for resellers.
- Make it easy for the teams to manage products, accounts, and loyalty benefits.
- Enable teams to build, maintain and deploy content and pages with ease
- Increase online orders and reduce the sales support load on the internal teams
Discovery
As a B2B distributor there were distinct differences with standard B2C commerce. I began by spending time with the teams at Trust to understand the market, their business model, and how this influenced their workflows and day-to-day activities.
Trust's frontline teams provided invaluable insight into the frustrations and problems that both customers and the internal teams were having. The extent to which customers were forgoing the online store in favour of over the phone orders and account support was surprising and impacting the team.
Definition
Having identified the audiences, personas, and activities that the store needed to support, we mapped the current experience and future vision before defining how we could deliver a better online experience that could ultimately reduce the dependency on the frontline team.
We didn’t want customers having to resort to the phone or sitting on hold, our goal was to create an experience where they could simply log on, create quotes, manage their accounts, and order what they needed knowing it would arrive quickly.
Design
Navigation and Information Architecture
Early on I wanted to establish an intuitive information architecture and navigation model as this was key to unlocking product discovery and purchasing paths. The challenge was making it easy to navigate, with confidence, over 6,000 often similar products whilst supporting new discovery pathways.
From the various customer journeys identified I prioritised 3 search patterns that we felt best represented the most common user behaviours.
- Open Discovery – assessing and comparing systems or products within a category
- Focused – compatibility and/or system specific searching
- Precise – searching for specific known products
Supporting product discovery
Whilst Trust work with hundreds of vendors, user purchasing followed the nature of their projects and tended to revolve around a few common brands and systems. Surfacing these into the core navigation tested well as it helped untangle compatibility concerns early in their journey.
To help customers locate specific results quickly we identified how visitors differentiated between similar products and reflected this in a tactile and intuitive real-time search that allowed quick course correction.
Alongside traditional categories users could now quickly and easily identity and focus their search based on the system or brand compatibility they needed or quickly find something specific.
Prototyping
As we started to prototype, I established a revitalised design language including a refined typographic system and UI components designed to complement their existing personality and provide a foundation for the modules and building blocks we would develop.
With the core navigation, product catalogue and purchasing flow working well our goal was to improve the discovery experience and the journey between learning more about a brand or system and purchase.
Content strategy and creator tools
I worked closely with the ecommerce and marketing teams to enable Trust to offer the consultancy, support, and advice they provided resellers offline whilst researching and planning solutions.
The result was a content strategy and system of components that were flexible enough for them to create brand, system, and category pages that blended content with products into guided experiences making it simple for users to explore, analyse, and find compatible products.
Understanding the needs of content creators
As we developed and introduced new components, authoring tools and ways of building responsive content into the CMS I coordinated closely with the team throughout to ensure a good match with their skillsets, and they found them simple to use. As we developed and introduced new components, authoring tools and ways of building responsive content into the CMS I coordinated closely with the team throughout to ensure a good match with their skillsets, and they found them simple to use.
Desinging a responsive experience
Providing a great mobile experience was essential as we knew customers were struggling, especially when onsite. Being unable to jump on, find what they needed and order meant they had to do everything over the phone or, as was often the case, via a competitor.
This was central to our approach and from the outset we designed, prototyped and tested for use across the full range of devices and formats, optimising to create the optimal experience.
Managing user accounts
To successfully support Trust’s retail model the store needed to automatically adapt to a user’s account and reflect their unique loyalty benefits, promotions, and pricing. However, managing and administering these accounts was often slow, resource intensive and causing problems.
Introducing self-service
We knew that a self-service approach had the potential to reduce the burden on internal teams whilst reducing delays and holdups customers often experienced. I worked with Trust's teams and users to design an experience that enabled them to achieve most of what they needed online.
Being able to add and remove users, control privileges, access order histories, and save quotes meant that customers had more control, weren’t having to wait and could manage projects with ease.
Operational integration
There were some technical and operational challenges to overcome, especially related to new account creation and allowing orders to being placed as quickly as possible but we were successfully able to achieve smooth workflows and experiences.
Results
I left the project as we were completing implementation testing. The team went on to successfully launch the new platform and online store.
The team's at Trust were making the most of the tools they had to manage and structure their product catalogue, create lots of content for the site, and scale their online campagins.
Trust were able to hand over much of the account management activities to their clients yet maintain control of overall account benefits. Support requests were reduced, and the majority of customers were now managing their accounts primarily online.