Coupa Supplier Portal

Guided Onboarding

Project Duration

3 months (initial release - 2020, incremental enhancements through late 2021)

My Role

Lead UX Designer (team of 2 designers, 2 developers, 1 Product Manager)

Project Summary

The Coupa Supplier Portal is a tool for suppliers to easily transact with customers who use the Coupa BSM (business spend management platform). The goal of the project was to increase supplier adoption. Along with the Product Manager, I put together a proposal to create a consumer friendly onboarding process to quickly and easily get suppliers onto the platform once invited by a customer (small, medium or large size business).

The Problem

The Supplier Portal only had a standard registration process for suppliers. Customers would reach out to their suppliers via email to invite them to register on the portal so they could conduct business transactions. The supplier would need to register on the portal. Upon first login they were taken to the portal home dashboard, but there was little to no guidance on how to properly setup the account in order to transact with customers (purchase orders, delivery methods, invoicing, etc.). This led to low adoption by suppliers as they would register an account, but wouldn’t complete all information needed to do business through the platform. In many cases, suppliers would not even complete the registration process in the first place.

The Solution

Our proposal was to initiate a guided onboarding process upon first login that would walk the supplier through the process, collecting only the details necessary to get them onto the portal quickly and easily to transact with customers. My goals for this process were: Consumer friendly (simple and easy like any consumer app), Progressive Disclosure (only show the minimum amount of information necessary at any time), Option to forward (links provided at various points in the process in case the person at the supplier company needed help from a person in another department, like finance, legal etc). The project was heavily informed by customer feedback data and analytics tracking.

User Research

Recruited several users of the portal (3 suppliers and 3 customers).
Invited several suppliers who registered but did not use the portal for transactions to give us feedback.
Identified pain points for all users.
Tracked how we thought our solutions would solve these pain points throughout our design process.
Invited those same users back to view and comment on the prototypes of the new process.

Results after launch

An increase of 300% (now at +1 Million!) in CSP accounts
Profile completion: increased from 6% to 40%
Monthly active users: increased 235%