Beacon

What is it?
An AI Powered User Assistant and Support Component for a Salesforce Based Agency Management System


Who was the client?
A Salesforce-based agency management system for the insurance industry needed a better solution for user and admin training, documentation, and simpler administration and user support.

Problems to Solve:

• How to teach a new user (to Salesforce and or the AMS) how to use the system without relying only on documentation, which is generally very static, not terribly friendly, and often time consuming?
• How to teach the user while they’re using the system?
• How do we keep the tool relevant for people who know the system and isn’t waste of space graphically?
• Getting support and giving support for software sucks, how do we help that experience?
• Can we use a pseudo-AI assistant to take the place of a trainer/support agent?
• Without having the user feel abandoned and dumped on a terrible AI. (Let’s be honest how we feel about support bots.)
• How can we take the friction out of the most important and difficult feature for users in Salesforce: reporting?
• Key Constraint: Must work within Salesforce using their tech stack.

The Research:

• One-on-one interviews with members of the team who were all Salesforce administrators or architects that had initially run their own agency or had been agents in the past.
• Market research in emerging tech trends globally, and then specifically in Insuretech industry.
• Deep dive into common pain points of the users in the industry in the last few years. (Cross referencing reviews from four different AMS's)
• First-hand experience as a customer support representative for a Salesforce based AMS learning Salesforce while on the job, while simultaneously trying to teach new users how to use it.
• Customer feedback of 500+ users over two years.

Research Findings

• Agents and people using the system in an agency didn’t have the time to learn on the job.
• Technology in agencies and in insurance were severely lagging.  Due to the pandemic and increased competition with big carriers, this was causing a high need to push beyond legacy system’s capabilities.
• Use of AI and cross system data especially popular to boost competitive edge when looking for funding for AMS from investors.
• Due to the large majority of agencies being small to medium sized with little to no IT staff, there would be a requirement of bringing more hands on support to those users.
• Since most Salesforce orgs were configured differently, we would need the ability for a support agent to have more knowledge about the individual systems than was feasible for the best support with the least amount of up front research on the agency’s org.
• Salesforce had a very high learning curve, even with the help of learning aids like their courses through Trailhead.  (Main complaint from users being that it wasn't quick enough for their needs, they didn't have the time to invest, and Trailhead didn't cover the AMS's features.)
• Users had difficulty finding a lot of key, useful information even after learning the system.  (Due sometimes in part to inexperienced admins configuring page layouts or too many admins making page layouts inconsistent.)
• Most support tickets to administrators or AMS support agents were either education based, reporting based, or easy to automate problems like adding new licenses.

Design Inspirations:

• A GPS system, but for a UI. 
• Apple’s spotlight tool on drop downs in versions of Mac OSX to find options. 
• Working as a consultant in various salesforce orgs with varying layouts, and not being able to find things on the page easily.  

What can Beacon do?  

• Beacon is both a guide, an assistant, and tier one support
• Can provide more information on a feature
• Guide users through workflow, and show how to use new features, provide documentation
• Will create tickets and set up appointments with our support team
• With data collected across the system as well as others systems, it can anticipate customers’ needs and give suggestions.
• Admins can use this for optimizing and cleaning up data.
• Since it will collect user interaction data, can provide Admins and the AMS's support team members with forensic insights into what happened when an incident occurs.

High Fidelity wireframes using the Lightning Design System.

Examples of customer scenarios based on user stories:

• New Users - “Where can I find the Additional Premium field?”
• Beacon will guide them to the location on the page using Beacon Guide.
• User - “What do I have to do today?”
• Beacon can look at tasks assigned to that user, and will look at policies they own and check for any that are going to be up for renewal.
• Admin - “My user deleted some files!!”
• Beacon will guide the admin to where they can find this in setup, and ask if they’d like to know more about restoring files from the trash.
• In this case, users will see images and icons to guide them once they leave the app.
• In other cases when not leaving the app, they can be shown with Beacon Guide.
• If the solution doesn’t help, they can continue to troubleshoot with Beacon or log a ticket.

Additional problems Beacon solves:

For the internal support team:

• Users need to be able to feel confident that they will get the help they need
• By always having Beacon available, they will have tier one support at their fingertips.
• Beacon will allow users (admins) to schedule an appointment within a few hours (feasibility of staff and scalability will need to be investigated for this)

• Since Beacon has been keeping track of all of the interactions with the system, this allows our support team to be able to have pre-emptive insight into what happened in the org before the customer even talks to them.
• CX members will need less time probing for diagnostics (Beacon handles taking basic ticket information too.)
• Can come to the customer with a solution and learning opportunities instead of more questions and a promise to reply to the ticket.
• Will surprise customers when the AMS support can already be ahead of the issue.
• Some tickets will be able to be logged directly as a bug and sent to dev; foregoing troubleshooting with the customer.

• Support team has more time to spend with the customer exclusively knowing they have specified timeframes with the customer and are not in a call system.
• Customers receive specialized support with a team that has the resources to provide white glove treatment.
• Support life doesn’t have to look like an endless sea of ticket triaging because Beacon will do the triaging for them.
• Beacon scrapes Salesforce’s site for documentation, thus removing SF specific things from needing to be documented and kept up by support staff.

For the sales team: 

• New user licenses could be ordered through Beacon
• Beacon could suggest getting development hours from our staff
• Less time spent teaching people in the implementations stage with the ability to guide a user with Beacon through basic beginner tasks
  
  

Results:

Client was extremely happy with designs, concepts, and problems the project solved.  It encompassed more than what they had initially intended and after seeing the data was interested in developing this further.  Their intention was to package this along with the larger project of the Salesforce based AMS they were looking to create as well.