Mind Mapping

Challenge    I am an e-commerce company founder and owner in the Philippines. We have our own  sales team to facilitate inquiries and orders of customers through our phone lines,  Facebook page, and our website.     Operating the business for more than 13 years, we gained a lot of web visits and  continue to capture more customers. We realized that we need to put more members in  our customer experience team to process more orders due to the high demand of our  products based on the number of inquiries we received every day in all these channels.  Unfortunately, the result is not parallel. Although we grew in captured audiences and  inquiries, the sales figures have remained stagnant.

In order to unlock this problem, I decided to conduct a qualitative survey approach to all  of our sales agents and I’d like to know their insights as to why the numbers of our  orders are not growing considering the fact that we double the number of agents in the  team.

Selection and Application

To able to do this, I decided to use Mind Mapping after gathering the insights from the  participants. I might say the date gathering method I use is effective. I was able to get  qualified answers.

Questionnaire

1. Are you happy with your work?

2. How do you find your workload? Too much? Too little? Just right.

2. What do you think is the bottleneck in your team why it cannot increase the number  of sales? How can the company help?

3. Who do you think are your top performers? Why them?

4. Are you a performer? Why?

5. What’s one thing we should stop doing?

6. Does anyone need performance improvement?

7. How can we help you to be more successful?

8. What do you feel and think about the recent changes?

9. What do I not understand about your team?

Insight & Approach

For context, before I conducted the research, I was hoping to validate my hypothesis  that adding manpower can answer our problem. Surprisingly, because of what I’ve  learned in the Design Thinking Module, this is not the solution.

From the insights that we’ve gathered, I plan to strengthen our employee engagement  and provide each member with personal training and development. This will be a holistic  approach for their career and personal growth. From the data, employees appreciated  the survey and felt like they were finally given a voice to share their sentiments. They  felt like their work was just a routine and they have lost their motivation for why they are  doing this job. It was also found in the survey that some members felt bad that we  added additional members. They feel like they were not competent enough to raise the  sales figures. We also need to tell them that it was not to sacrifice the quality of our  customer experience and to properly handle the orders since the volumes are growing.

The alternative tool that I will use to validate the effectiveness of these findings is to  create a Visualization tool. Using Visualization - using this tool, our customer and sales  representatives can see where they are in the picture and how their work functions in  the company’s ecosystem.

