Optimizing Procurement Flows in Traditional Expense Tools
The story of how we went from wide to narrow in our research to ensure we were not limiting our customers to our current experience for all use-cases.
Background
Emburse’s largest expense management product, Chrome River, had been built to optimize workflows for traditional travel and entertainment expense management. As we continued selling up-market, we ran into cases of departmental P-card spend: a type of spend that was not traditional low-dollar-value expenses for an individual, but higher-dollar-value purchases for supplies or team needs. Our product team made it a priority for 2024 to build workflows optimized for departmental P-card spend, to reduce the need for our customers to continue using other tools to manage it and thereby capture more of their business.
Problem
In the summer of 2023, the product team wanted to estimate the number of customers who had departmental P-card spend. We had heard anecdotal evidence of the use-case from previous qualitative studies, but wanted a quantifier of the potential audience we could be designing solutions for, to determine if it was worthwhile to pursue.
I designed a short in-product survey to be launched to all financial administrators using our product to determine if they had the type of spend we were referring to.
We learned that around 30% of our customers had this type of spend managed through a P-card program.
50% of those customers were using a different tool to report it, indicating our solution wasn't perfect for their needs.
Challenge
Based on the survey results, product managers felt that it was worthwhile to pursue building different features to support P-card departmental spend, both to make the existing customers who were currently using our platform for P-card happier, and to convert our customers who were using other tools for their P-card spend.
The overall goal of the research initiative was to understand our clients’ P-card usage experience, and to recommend enhancement solutions for reporting and reconciling P-card transactions.
Target Audience
We had launched the survey to all financial administrators using the product, but particularly wanted to target two of our personas for this. We recruited for these two personas from the largest verticals among our customers: Legal, Higher Education, Healthcare, and Manufacturing.
The Technical Admin
Who’s role was optimizing tools like Chrome River for their employees and would know about any technical limitations the customer had experienced with managing P-card spend in Chrome River.
Example job title: Finance Systems Manager
The Super Admin
Who’s role was overseeing all financial processes at the company, and who is ultimately responsible for accounting, credit card reconciliation, and accounts payable. She would have feedback on how P-card spend needed to be handled from an accounting perspective.
Example job title: Controller
Planning
Within the target audience, there were different customer types:
1. Type A used our native card program and Chrome River for reporting the transactions
2. Type B used a different card program and Chrome River for reporting
3. Type C used a different card program and a different tool for reporting
We saught insights from all groups, so that we could learn how to optimize for existing customers AND those who had decided not to use our product for this workflow due to current product limitations.
To split up the research into phases, we made a prioritization sheet listing out expectations for each group.
PRIORITIZATION SHEET
This enabled our decision to start with Type C: customers that currently used a different card program and a different tool for reporting, as this would give us insights about what worked well for P-cards and what didn’t, thinking beyond the constraints of the current tool.
Role & Timeline
​As this was a multi-phase, high priority project, it was a good opportunity for the new researcher to learn more about the subject area by owning Phase 1, where I assisted and supported her. I owned the second phase when our stakeholders needed the research to facilitate a narrowing of ideas. In total, the project took a little over a quarter to complete, from December 2023 to February 2024.
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Research Goals & Methods
PHASE 1 GOALS:
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Understand ideal P-card reconciliation process
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User preferences on P-card transaction submission process
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User motivations behind their current behaviors
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Learn about the current pain point and potential gaps to fill for the P-card reconciliation process.
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PHASE 1 METHODS:
Interviews with six Type C customers
PHASE 2 GOALS:
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Understand admins’ current setup for P-card reconciliation and uncover greatest opportunities for reducing friction
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Understand importance of expense-centric features for P-card
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Uncover preferred P-card specific workflows
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Understand what card management and issuance space looks like for P-card admins
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Understand Emburse Cards admins attitudes about not having ad-hoc issuance within Chrome River
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PHASE 2 METHODS:
Interviews with five Type A customers and five Type B customers
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Interview Questions
​I structured my Phase 2 interview script to align each interview question to the goals and assumptions that the product managers and I had discussed for each particular goal.
INTERVIEW SCRIPT EXCERPT
Analysis & Synthesis
We had a massive amount of notes from the ten hour-long interviews to sort through.
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I first listened to all interview recordings and tagged them with deductive tags to keep track of broad groups. Then I completed thematic mapping within the tagged groups I’d created to pull out themes within topics.
SNAPSHOT OF MAPPING WITH TAGS
Deliverables
​With the large quantity of insights generated, it was imperative that I present my findings with logical organization and be discerning about what I included and excluded, to not overwhelm my stakeholders.
I divided the findings into three sections: what we’d learned about the Current Workflow, the Key Opportunities (greatest problem areas within current workflow), and Solutions Exploration (what we’d learned about the ideas we had been considering from Phase 1.
I ended the presentation with a list of our original assumptions and if the research found support or did not find support for them, and structured my recommendations around the problems we should put effort into, and what ideas we should avoid more investment in, as they were solutions for low impact problems.
EXAMPLES OF DELIVERABLES HAVE BEEN EXCLUDED TO PROTECT COMPANY AND PARICIPANT DATA. PLEASE REACH OUT TO ME FOR A COMPLETE CASE STUDY OVERVIEW.
Organizational Impact
We developed an in-depth understanding of a previously gray area: how customers think about and prefer to manage departmental P-card spend, including the details that were most important to capture for those purchases.
We made a detailed map of P-card reporting and reconciliation processes that were shared with other team members ramping up on the project.
We eliminated certain solution ideas from our continued design and development process, as we learned from research that they would serve low-impact problems.
We identified the key section of the P-card management process that is the greatest pain point, enabling ideation, which is currently underway.
Reflections
As a researcher, I was able to deliver some of my best work because I was involved in both phases of the project, from the generative discovery phase, to the defining phase where we could start evaluating some of our ideas and eliminating early on. It was refreshing to be involved with both phases, rather than just one.
Two researchers working on synthesis results in better quality insights. We were able to question each other’s thematic groupings, and probe for more details to make the insight clearer.
Quantifying the use-case alongside our interviews gave our findings more credibility. Since we had started with the survey to size the use-case, stakeholders outside of product and design were more open to believing in the problems we presented, even though those insights were gained from a smaller sample size.