Designing Customer Insights and extending it with Upsell Opportunities.
Customer Insights began as an underused Cisco dashboard. I led the research and redesign around the questions account teams asked while preparing for customer meetings. Its user base grew 40% within three months of the redesign.
As more people used Customer Insights, Cisco teams responsible for upgrades and buying programs asked to add their offers to the dashboard. I designed a framework for adding those offers one at a time and reusing data already available in Customer Insights.
Researching account strategy:
The existing page gave account managers a broad overview of a customer. To prepare a strategy, they still had to gather information from several internal tools and build their own pivot tables.
I focused the interviews on participants’ two most recent customer meetings because meeting preparation was one of the few times account teams gathered all the information they needed to develop a strategy.
I interviewed 12 participants across three countries. Most managers described a short set of questions they tried to answer while developing a customer strategy, and their pivot tables showed how they combined information that the dashboard kept separate.
Designing reusable insight modules:
I designed visualizations to answer the questions account managers considered while developing a customer strategy.
I organized those visualizations into repeatable modules so users could move from a summary into the underlying data. One module used expandable table rows, and the same interaction could be reused across different datasets.
Testing dashboard concepts:
To decide where users should begin, I translated one product question into two opposing principles. Concept 01 gave users a catalog of visualizations and the freedom to decide what mattered. Concept 02 curated metrics against predefined benchmarks so the dashboard could recommend where to look first.
Participants preferred the guided starting point because it helped them choose a next step before reading a chart. Customer differences made benchmark colors unreliable, so the final design kept the tile hierarchy and removed benchmark-based status colors.
Impact of phase one:
Over the three months after the redesign, the number of users grew by 40%.
That growth showed program teams where account managers were spending their time, so they began asking to add upgrades and buying-program offers to Customer Insights. Each offer required its own data validation and backend integration, and we could only add one at a time. I needed a repeatable way to add more offers later.
Customer information organized around the questions account teams asked.
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Testing opportunity placement:
I tested panels, lists, overlays, and inline modules with account-team participants. People often overlooked the panel and list when they used internal program names, even when the panel occupied a quarter of the screen.
Internal program names did not explain why an offer mattered. I rewrote each offer around the action an account manager could take and the potential value for that customer.
Connecting opportunities to customer data:
I reviewed spreadsheets from the program teams and found that every offer reused a subset of data already shown in Customer Insights.
I treated each offer as a lens on that data. Selecting one filtered or expanded the existing charts and tables.
Impact of phase two:
Customer Insights became the only Cisco platform where account teams could analyze current customer data and identify growth opportunities in one place. At that point, Customer Insights supported four offers.
What I learned:
Phase one: A clear research and design roadmap helped me win stakeholder support.
The roadmap showed why the research was necessary, which case studies informed the approach, and how long the work would take.
Phase two: I had to understand what motivated account managers to act.
They paid attention when an offer showed how it could help them reach quarterly or annual goals. A larger, brighter module alone had not produced that response.