Customers

Nutrien produces, markets and distributes over 25 million tonnes of potash, nitrogen and phosphate products for agricultural, industrial and feed customers world-wide. Our sales people, or “Crop Consultants” work with up to 50 customers (AKA Growers) each to ensure that all their agricultural needs are met. With a volume of work like that, it’s important for the digital platform to reflect the reality of how customers’ businesses work so that users’ workflows can flow seamlessly. This project was an effort to reorient our digital platform to better match that reality.

The Big Picture

The hierarchy of Customers, their Organization and their Accounts influences every feature in the platform and is a foundational element to how they operate. We were keenly aware that any changes we made would have ripple effects and unforeseen issues, so our first step was to better understand the landscape of what we were working with.

We soon discovered that we were facing a myriad of complex problems. Over the course of a quarter, my PM, the tech lead, myself and teams in other departments collaborated to analyze and test each of them. Because of the breadth of the work, on this page I will touch on each of the problems at a high level. I have a larger presentation available if more detail is desired.

Customer/Account Hierarchy

Before Nutrien Ag Solutions’ platform existed, there was ARS, a point of sale system that Crop Consultants used to charge products and services. If customers wanted to have separate accounts for different business partners for example, they could, but they could not exist under the same organizational umbrella. This causes issues in the platform. For example, imagine that you have two credit cards you want to use to purchase things from Amazon, but Amazon forces you to have two separate logins for each of them. This breaks down our ability to make product recommendations and the customers ability to easily navigate purchase history, etc.

Solution #1: Merge Customers

With the amount of customers that we have, it would be tough for us to go in and clean up the mess that has been made over many years. One way to reckon with this would be to give the user the ability to merge two accounts under one customer login. (Going back to the Amazon analogy: move the two two credit cards under one login instead of two.)

Solution #2: All Customers Page

With the change in hierarchy, the Crop Consultant would need a new way to navigate through all their assigned customers. Here is the ‘All Customers’ page.

Nomenclature

There are multiple entities that one could refer to as the “Customer”. In practice, a person buying products, an account, and a business or organization could all be called a customer. This may be acceptable in the field where context is easy to pick up, but on a digital platform this causes confusion quickly. Each entity needs its own name. 

Solution

In one of my early concept tests, I found that Crop Consultants would not be confused if we called the business entity of a customer an “Organization.

In Conclusion

This work was erring on the side of customer experience design, which was both interesting and complex.  While this project did result in a handful of UX/UI designs, the bulk of the work ended up being discovery and documentation. The insights that we were able to uncover were paramount to the future of the platform.

The concepts shown on this page is a small window into the work that was done. Please let me know if you are interested in seeing more details and I would be happy to walk you through a more in-depth presentation.

*Bonus Content*

Below I’ve included several videos I recorded to present the progress of work to the department.