Revamping the Reseller Experience
Eagle Eye Networks UX Research | October 2023 - Jan 2024
Role: Lead UX Researcher
Starting off our UXR journey at EEN with the Reseller Dashboard
BACKGROUND
Eagle Eye Networks is a leader in cloud based video surveillance solutions for businesses and enterprises. Our resellers are crucial to our business growth and have a big impact on the customer as the main point of contact. Using Eagle Eye’s AI based security video system, customers can manage, view, and investigate video from any device across all locations remotely.
EEN system provides a dashboard for our resellers to manage their customer accounts. Our goal was to rethink this dashboard to optimize their experience.
Additionally for context, user research was a new initiative at the company. This was the the company’s first official UX Research project and my first project as UX Researcher.
Goals to drive EEN x Reseller Success
GOALS
Given the critical role of reseller satisfaction in driving business growth and the luxury of few months lead time, we strategically initiated this project with UX research. This approach provided crucial user insights to inform the PRD, design and implementation phases. Goals for the research are below.
Preview of the Process
PROCESS TLDR
Discovery Stage
DISCOVERY
As my first project as UX Researcher, I started talking to stakeholders, Support, and Sales Engineers to get a deeper understanding of who are users are, main industries, main use cases, and key pain points from their perspective. I gained more insight into the overall business and sales operations.
Here’s what I learned:
Key Verticals - Retail, Restaurants, Banks, Warehouses, Multifamily residential, Cannabis, Schools
Common Pain points among our resellers/end users and their needs, the percentage of support issues from resellers versus end users. The support is for reseller 75 percent of the time.
Business Operations
Learned more about how the reseller/EEN relationship and how they source and close deals with end customers. Success of the sales is dependent on end user having the best experience and getting that end user in the right reseller relationship
Reseller Onboarding and Certification Process
Domain knowledge of EEN hardware, installation, deployment
Research Stage
RESEARCH
Collect and Analyze Existing Data
Pulled data from database with list of all our resellers and extracted some insights on the number of cameras and accounts for each reseller, breakdown of what range of cameras most of our resellers manage, how many cameras per account for a reseller on average, etc. Got a better idea of our reseller demographic.
Used the Customer Success dashboard to see who our resellers and their customers are and to see real time data on how many cameras each reseller has
Support tickets helped to see what common issues a specific reseller faced. For example, I looked through the tickets of our product council and bigger resellers.
2. Understand Current End to End Experience
Talked to PM / SE / Support - learned about specific use cases, customers, how end users and resellers utilize the platform differently
Joined reseller training session to see what resellers are trained on, what to look out for when setting up the system, important settings in the application, etc.
Played with the current interface as customer zero to identify gaps/challenges and to understand the experience in detail
3. Create Guideline and Framework for User Interviews
I defined 15 questions to dissect their pain points and desires. Questions were a combination of understanding and open ended.
4. Getting in contact with resellers to recruit and schedule interviews
Collaborating with Product Marketing to connect me to product council (friendly resellers).
5. EEN Summit
Established first connection with resellers at our annual EEN Summit with resellers. Hosted a UX improvements booth in our Product Lab where I was able to talk to 20+ resellers. I created a survey that they could scan to give feedback, but I ended up having really enriching conversations with them when they came to the booth.
6. Guideline Script for User Interviews
Reached out and conducted user interviews with 13 resellers to identify key/common pain points, needs, etc. The questions during reseller interviews were open ended questions that covered topics like role, current experience with EEN dashboard, goals, challenges, desires for improvements, etc. Each interview was approximately 45 minutes.
7. User Interviews
Reached out and conducted user interviews with 13 resellers to identify key/common pain points, needs, etc. The questions during reseller interviews were open ended questions that covered topics like role, current experience with EEN dashboard, goals, challenges, desires for improvements, etc. Each interview was approximately 45 minutes.
8. Extract Insights and Make them Actionable
Analyze and share findings with team - I noted down all feedback I got from each reseller in Figjam and grouped together the same or common feedback.
Consolidated findings in a report and presented to team
Key Insights
RESULTS
I extracted 8 themes that were discovered. The order of the insights were based on a combination of User Impact and User Feedback Consistency.
Key Themes
Adding and configuring cameras is cumbersome for third party cameras
A more dynamic dashboard that can provide analysis and reports
Lacking clear communication and user feedback in dashboard
Excessive and noisy notifications
Improve collaboration and awareness for reseller team
Lacking visibility into firmware version and updates
Permissions and users
Unable to add users to multiple accounts
Collaborating with PM Team to Translate Insights into Actionable Items in the Roadmap
RESULTS
With the insights and recommendations for enhancing the reseller experience in hand, my focus shifted to ensuring their integration into the product roadmap. I collaborated with the relevant Product Managers for each identified problem or desired feature, discussing feasibility and potential timelines for implementation. A comprehensive spreadsheet was utilized to track all initiatives, associated tickets, and their respective PMs for ongoing status monitoring.
Takeaways
LEARNINGS
Establishing a relationship with reseller is crucial to getting product feedback
Resellers are more prone to conversing in real time rather than filling out forms or surveys as seen by product lab in Summit. Next year, I plan to have 1 or two key features or product areas that need feedback on and tailor the conversations to get info on that.