Order Form Redesign

Visuals are reconstructed; specifics are anonymized. Work was done at a sports streaming company.

The workflow and where it broke

My department places orders that get shipped by our warehouse. The customer support team gets the information about what the customer needs and sends it to me.

A few years ago, the CS team was putting in a lot of cases, but the information was rarely clear. If a customer said, “I want X, Y, and Z,” the team member would put in a case and say “they want X, Y, and Z”.

I’d get orders that didn’t have:

• Who was supposed to receive the equipment
• What other things they might need to go with it (e.g. required equipment)
• The date by when they needed it
• Whether they needed us to arrange someone to come install the equipment

I’d go back to the CS team to track these down. But at this time, most of CS was made up of part-time employees, and often either the person who took the call or the customer they’d spoken to was no longer responsive. Orders would sit. The customer’s needs weren’t getting met.

The insight

The CS team wasn’t withholding context, but they didn’t know what context I needed.

The fix couldn’t live at the people level. I couldn’t restructure or retrain the team. So it had to live in the process itself.

The redesign

After a particularly rough season of this, I partnered with our Salesforce project manager. I designed the form’s logic and questions. She built it in Salesforce.

The principle: rather than just ask what the customer wanted, we’d gather the context.

The form requires:

• Type — parts, install, or both — drives the conditional fields
• Description — free-text for context not captured by the structured fields
• Contact info — defaults to the venue’s primary contact, with override
• Priority / next event — the next date the venue would be used, so I knew how urgent it was
• Conditional info — shown based on type. For parts: our part category, not the customer’s words. For install: site details (lift Y/N, install reason, etc.)

I realized, also, that the team probably wasn’t being trained on the exact equipment; they just knew what they’d picked up over time plus what the customer said. So we also added part reference photos into the form, to make it easier to match what the customer said with what they ordered.

After launch, there were a few tweaks we made based on use. For example, the contact name field started as editable text, but people would put email addresses or a CC they also wanted contacted. So we made it a searchable object and let people create a new contact if the one they needed wasn’t there.

The overall result was that you couldn’t make a request without filling out the form, and you couldn’t fill out the form without providing the relevant information.

What changed

Once the form rolled out, most orders started going through immediately, because I had the context I needed without having to chase it. CS reps intuitively learned the pattern: if I don’t gather this information now, I’m going to have to go back and get it — or my request won’t go through.

Per Salesforce data at the time, order processing time dropped by ~24%. The form is still in use today.

The honest limit: I still get requests that say “ship me one of everything, please” from time to time. But the form steered the majority of cases into being relevant and actionable. It equipped people with the information they needed to do better, and — to their credit — most did.

Reflection

This project gave me the chance to improve the order process and show (rather than tell) the team what we needed further down the install/order pipeline. Once the CS team could see what to provide, they did.