Commerce Departmental Research Discovery
SaaS E-Commerce | UX Researcher
Tools Used: Microsoft Teams | HeyMarvin | FigJam
Overview
The objective of this research was to obtain a comprehensive understanding of our current processes related to promoting, pricing, selling, onboarding, and billing customers for our product offering. Through this analysis, I identified areas of misalignment, internal process challenges, and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, I examined how each team articulates the value of our product, their expectations for the commerce team, and where the 3rd party commerce offering we choose could best integrate into our sales-driven approach.
Research Objectives
Understand existing processes for promoting, selling, and billing our customers.
Uncover the perceived value proposition of the product among internal stakeholders.
Identify process challenges and pain points across teams.
Clarify stakeholder expectations for the broader commerce initiative.
Identify opportunities to strengthen the product’s value for customers.
Research Methodology
Generative Stakeholder Interviews
Number of Interviews: 5 | Total Number of Participants: 8 | Tools: Aha (planning), MS Teams, HeyMarvin, PPT, and FigJam
Departments Represented
Interview Script Planning
To ensure a structured and insightful research process, I began by gathering preliminary questions, identifying unknowns, and capturing assumptions from team members. I collaborated with the team to refine these into a focused question set, developing role-specific interview scripts aligned to shared research objectives.
While tailoring questions for each role, I maintained a core set of questions, highlighted in grey, that were asked across all sessions to provide a consistent quantitative measure. This approach enabled meaningful cross-department comparisons and streamlined the synthesis of actionable themes.
Research Synthesis Process
AI-Accelerated Setup with HeyMarvin
For each interview, I invited HeyMarvin to the call to support synthesis after the fact. Marvin’s AI-generated notes and insights helped streamline the analysis process, though I verified all outputs and pulled relevant video clips to highlight key moments.
Affinity Mapping in FigJam
After validating Marvin's insights, I synthesized findings using an affinity mapping approach in FigJam. Interview observations were organized into six key categories (listed below) to surface cross-departmental patterns, shared challenges, unmet needs, and alignment opportunities.
Process Discoveries
Internal Pain Points
Improvement Opportunities / Priorities
Product Value (per department)
Value Proposition Opportunities
Commerce Initiative Expectations
The images below are intentionally blurred to maintain company privacy and protect sensitive information. These affinity mapping visuals demonstrate how raw data and observations were organized into thematic clusters. This process directly informed and supported the key findings presented below.
Findings
Expectations for Commerce Initiative and Team
🎯 Simplify Sales and Onboarding: Simplify the sales and onboarding process to benefit both internal staff and customers, while maintaining the current sales-led approach without disruption.
🎯 Improve Payment and Billing: Improve the payment and billing process to align with industry best practices, including ensuring payment collection occurs at the time of contract execution.
🎯 Identify Simplification Opportunities: Identify opportunities to simplify the sales-led process by addressing inconsistencies and reducing unnecessary complexity.
🎯 Streamline Data Transfer: Streamline data transfer between Salesforce and [our product], incorporating an improved payment collection workflow.
🎯 Enhance Forecasting and Tracking: Enhance revenue forecasting and customer account tracking for the accounting team to facilitate easier management and reporting.
Key Departmental Themes on the Value of Our Product
👍 Unified, Cohesive Experience Increases Stickiness: The product is perceived as a comprehensive ecosystem that integrates multiple offerings under one brand and experience. This unity enhances customer satisfaction, strengthens brand perception, and creates a “stickier” solution that’s more compelling and harder to leave.
👍 Empowerment and Impact: Emphasis on empowering churches to focus on their core mission (generosity and health) by saving time and streamlining operations.
👍 Value and Pricing: The product delivers exceptional value relative to its price, offering an end-to-end solution that customers perceive as underpriced.
👎 Challenges in Positioning: Despite the strong value, inconsistent sales messaging and unclear onboarding paths sometimes lead to customer confusion.
Internal Process Challenges and Pain Points
📝 Sales Process Lacks Standardization and Clarity
Sales Process: Lacks consistency and standardization, reducing productivity and clarity.
Sales Contracts: No clear guidelines for customizing contracts, creating extra work for accounting. Clear guardrails would streamline this.
Discounting Practices: Wide variation and limited controls hinder pricing analysis and alignment. Standardized discount and promotion rules would improve contracts and billing.
Sales Hand-off Notes: Incomplete or missing notes cause friction in onboarding. Consistent hand-offs would smooth transitions.
Price Models & Repository: Complex product offerings and decentralized pricing data lead to inconsistent pricing. Centralizing price lists would help.
Enterprise vs. Commercial: No clear criteria to distinguish customer types, causing inconsistent sales approaches.
Customer Portfolio Knowledge: Selling additional giving products to customers who already have giving software causes onboarding issues. Better internal knowledge-sharing would prevent this.
Missing In-App Guide: Trial and welcome experience lacks an in-app walkthrough, making it harder for prospects to grasp product value and lowering sales conversions.
🛠️ Insufficient Resources to Market Our Product to Its Full Potential
Marketing Collateral: Shortage of marketing materials, especially visuals, for sales engagement.
Small Marketing Team: Marketing team size is much smaller than sales, limiting focus on diverse customer segments.
Onboarding Support: Limited resources restrict onboarding from providing personalized check-ins and support to all new customers.
Enhancing Our Product’s Value: Department Insights & Key Opportunities
UX Improvements That May Increase Customer Value
Analytics Dashboard: Our customers may benefit from the addition of an analytics dashboard to better understand their data.
Giving Enhancement: Allow users to round up their giving within our giving offering to increase generosity.
Usage Tracking Transparency: Implement a way for users to track their usage per offering to avoid surprise overage charges.
Key Opportunities for Improvement
Product Parity: Strengthen product parity across the our product offering to ensure consistency.
Competitive Advantage: Maintain a competitive edge by leveraging Voice of Customer (VOC) insights from sales and research, alongside conducting a gap analysis of our offerings.
Defined Customer Segments: Enhance targeting by refining customer segments based on church size and typical usage needs, empowering sales, pricing, and marketing teams.
Professional Services Bundling: Elevate customer value by embedding a set number of professional services within each bundle, rather than offering them as add-ons (currently under discussion).
Next Steps
We used these insights as a foundation for our commerce planning and priority setting. This helped us identify key opportunities to simplify processes, improve customer value, and strengthen alignment across teams. Grounded in the findings, we were able to focus our efforts strategically to drive more cohesive and effective outcomes.
As a result, we prioritized several key initiatives:
Ensuring professional services are included in the new bundling structure
Defining customer segments within detailed user journeys
Standardizing discounting practices and pricing models
Adding an in-app guide to support both trial users and direct purchasers