User Experience Researcher & Service Designer
Improving the Experience for B2B Partners
Acquia is an open source digital platform, offering software solutions such as cloud platform for website developers
My role was as a Service Designer leading the project. I was tasked in understanding the experience of Acquia's Partners by identifying pain points, delights, and providing actionable recommendations. I collaborated with internal subject matter experts and the Service Design Manager for three months to complete the project.
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I led the qualitative research and analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data by first talking with subject matter experts to understand the back end process of working with Partners. A survey was conducted asking 20 partners their opinions on the partner experience and marking interest in participating in additional interviews. I connected with Partners who were willing to participate in follow-up interviews.
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Through this project, I learned the importance of working with internal teams before talking with customer or company partners to navigate the complex relationship properly when conducting interviews and developing a discussion guide.
We used the double diamond design process
Defining the Problem with B2B Partnerships
After mapping the pain points, delights, and opportunities across the phases of the partner journey, it became clear the first three phases were where the most effort should be placed to improve the partner experience.
Partners wanted a more transparent, collaborative effort where the expectations were clear from the start of the journey. ​​​
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"Your team is gonna prioritize the ones who do bring leads over to you…you know, I scratch your back, you scratch mine kind of a thing. So I think that’s okay. That’s normal. But that role for me was unclear."
- Partner quote​​​​
Recommendations to improve the Partner Experience
I provided the Senior Vice President of Product and Solution Marketing and Senior Vice President/General Manager of the Content Business Unit with four recommendations:
​4/4 of the partners interviewed desired:
- Transparency on potential leads to build business
- Prioritization given to premium partner relationships
- Clarity of partnership expectations and who is responsible for finding leads
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11/20 of the partners surveyed desired:
- More joint selling
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The VP of Marketing and Senior VP of Business Solutions were able to use this information to address and improve the relationship with current and future Partners.
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