Surpass Customer Expectations with Opportunities

When discovering what a customer needs from a solution, ideas often emerge for a perfect solution. These ideas fall out of scope of the current discovery. The pressure to deliver a solution within the current scope makes it tempting to dismiss these ideas. There won’t be enough time to develop these ideas. The case below shows how keeping a list of “perfect solution” ideas paid off.

Guest Registration Reality

My company was hired to develop an event registration solution for a major sponsor of the Olympics and FIFA World Cup. The sponsor sold packages of game tickets and hotel accommodations to their business units, who invited guests to the games. Coordinators within the business unit registered guests by entering their data into a “package registration” detail page.

While the detail page worked well enough for three years, we kept discovering needs to improve the registration experience. We enhanced the registration page as much as we could, within the constraints of page layouts and Visualforce components. We collected needs that fell outside of those constraints or the current scope for a “Nirvana” registration solution.

The Dream of Registration Nirvana

In Registration Nirvana, a coordinator could easily accommodate a guest’s special requests. For example, some guests wanted to arrive before their package start date, or stay after their package end date. These special requests required additional room nights and an unscheduled ride to or from the hotel. The coordinator had to approve the extra charges to extend the guest’s stay. Registration Nirvana would show the coordinator special request(s) as soon as s/he entered an early arrival or late departure date. They could see which special requests needed their approval.

Registration required a photo of the guest to put on their badge. When a coordinator entered data on the package registration detail page, s/he attached a photo file to the package registration record. This required several steps, and the photo was not visible on the page. In Registration Nirvana, the coordinator would drag the guest’s photo from a folder on their PC and drop it onto the registration form. The guest photo would appear on the form with one simple step.

As we collected Registration Nirvana ideas, I realized that we would need more than Visualforce. When Salesforce launched Lightning, I saw the opportunity for a breakthrough user experience.

The Realization of Registration Nirvana

With the Spring ‘17 release of Salesforce, I determined that Lightning provided the robust platform we needed to deliver an interactive user experience to coordinators. I gathered all the needs and ideas for Registration Nirvana we had collected over the years, and reviewed them with the program manager. We ranked them and launched the Registration Nirvana development project.

We rolled out Registration Nirvana for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Coordinators enjoyed the streamlined, informative registration process. For example, they could view a registration at a glance by collapsing the form into headings.

This fictitious registration for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics shows guest name, arrival, departure and hotel information. The gold headings show sections that do not have all of the information required for registration.

We had kept the Registration Nirvana needs for years, anticipating a time we could turn them into reality. That time came in 2017, when registration returned to the top of the project list and Lightning matured enough to realize our dream.

Ambitious ideas often emerge in discovery, outside of the current scope.  Collect those ideas for a time when you can realize the dream of an ideal solution.

This is the tenth in a series of posts about unknowns in the discovery process.