Sales Agent Dashboard

A UX Case Study

7 min readJul 7, 2020

Context

Happy Healthy Me (HHM) is a global insurance company that provides medical insurance worldwide with offices in multiple locations. The company offers various innovative insurance products keeping in mind the different needs of people. However, startups are now disrupting this space with innovative business models and this is a major area of concern for HHM. Traditionally, in developing markets, better distribution has been the key to better performance of insurance companies. The way to better distribution is through having more agents on the field. The catch here is that the bigger the teams become, the more difficult it is to manage. Also, as companies grow bigger, they tend to lose touch with their customers. HHM wants to avoid this and has decided to empower the senior agents in the company with more information on their sales teams and customer behavior. They believe this will improve their sales performance and customer retention.

Senior agents have trouble tracking the progress of their teams and identifying the issues they face.

If the sales go down in a month, they go on to assume that it is because of their team. They do not get any information on why customers sometimes do not renew their policies and rely on the word of their field agents to analyze what can be improved.

Problem Statement

It’s difficult to track key performance indicators and issues faced by field agents ultimately affecting company revenue.

The Fix

A transparent system providing data on field agents & their customers and presenting actionable information to help senior agents make informed business decisions.

Scroll down to see the design process and the final design.

Design Process

I will now go through the process of understanding the problem, gathering takeaways to exploring possible design approaches and finally arriving at the proposed solution.

The goal we are trying to achieve by putting a system in place is to ultimately increase company revenue. To increase company revenue, we must have data to validate what within the sales teams is working well and what is not.

Data Gathering

I started off by collecting business data about HHM and trying to understand what different products, performance and customer retention metrics are that need to be considered for providing and adequate solution.

Assumptions

Below are a few assumptions for this project.

For visibility of this information on agents, we need to have an MVP which can:

- track financial performance of each agent in the team

- provide customer retention information against each product and agent

- show growth projections taking into account the standard churn rates against every product and agent

Understanding the Problem

I looked into the typical hierarchy of sales forces to understand the function better. This helped me understand how and what information flows through the chain.

Some of the questions that came up are:

How does a senior agent collect the data?

Where does he capture the data that is collected?

How does a senior agent currently track the data?

What are the metrics that he has to track?

Do field agents send data without at a regular frequency?

Do field agents have specific formats in which they are expected to deliver the data?

How do senior agents compare the deliverables per agent?

How to field agents maintain their data?

How often is the data reviewed with each agent to understand improvement areas?

Pain Points

Here are the main user pain points at each step:

Insight

1. Users want to see KPI’s in a standardized format.

No clear list of comparable metrics captured in a standardized format. Currently data collection is dependent on haphazard questions/answers with each field agent.

2. Users would like to collect and maintain data in a systematic and standardized manner

Editable tools are used for handling data. The collected data was managed on an excel sheet causing room for error.

3. No Real Time Data

Users would like to spend more time analyzing the data than actually coordinating collection and organizing it. They rely on person to person meetings/emails/calls/messages to collect data. Each senior agents collects data in the way suitable for him — multiple ways of collecting data within the company. This makes comparison between area/regional performance hard. Senior agents would like each field agent to see his performance real time against targets.

The Opportunity

So how might we enable collection and visualization of information, so that the senior agents will be able to make better judgment calls, alter their ways of operation and improve efficiency?

There are 2 types of users here:

1. Field Agents — who key in the data

2. Senior Agents — who review, analyze and are expected to track performance

For this case study, I will focus on the senior agent as the primary user.

Basic Design Considerations

- Defined list of Financial Performance metrics

- Defined list of Customer Retention Metrics

- Establish Visual hierarchy within the metrics

- Display by Agent/Area/Region

- Display by Product

- Analytics overview — key results (updated regularly)

- Highlight non-entries, reminders

- Ability to compare agents/areas/regions

- More visual, less text

Task Flows

I identified the different task flows and tried sketching the possible journeys. With this, the overall basic task flow for the senior agent was generated.

Information Architecture

The basic task flow was elaborated more to develop the IA of this system.

Ideation

So how do we want the dashboard to feel? It must give good data points but should not feel intimidating.

For instance(jumping to a completely different industry), notice how the interior console design of the space shuttle has changed over time. This might seem irrelevant but what I’m trying to say here is that the user must not feel overwhelmed.

We can safely say that in the above pictures, the level of interface intimidation has definitely come down over time.

When it comes to dashboard design, content is key. The first screen must provide the real important stuff. A bit more research revealed that anything beyond 9 key data sections can make the data seem overwhelming.

Keeping these ideas in mind, I made a few sketches.

Approach Exploration

Observations

This exploration led to the below options for the dashboard layout:

- Viewing data is the primary activity

- Maximum screen space to display the KPI summary

- Search function should be comprehensive across the system

- Customizable view ports would add to user flexibility

- Flexibility to change view types by product/agent/customer

Inference

Based on the above observations, it made sense to look into Option 3 & 4 and explore further with wire-frames.

Wireframe

UI Exploration

I started to play with the grid system proportions on the dashboard and then went on to try some colors and specifics to refine the wire-frame into the proposed UI.