Jive Communications · 2015
Making Jive Easy to Do Business With
Channel partners — about a third of the company's business — were choosing competitors like RingCentral and 8x8. The reason kept coming up: "Jive is a great company, but it is just too hard to do business with."
Executives asked me to automate onboarding. I started with the question behind the question: what outcome did they actually need? The answer wasn't automation — it was making Jive easy to do business with. So I built a cross-functional team that had never existed, created the company's first service blueprint, and delivered both new software and process changes that transformed the partner experience.
“Too hard to do business with”
Partners churning, blaming the software
“Channel Partners love selling us”
The exact phrase partners started using
Challenging the Brief
Jay (Product Manager), our dev team, and I were asked to automate customer onboarding. Before building anything, we asked: what outcome do the executives actually need — and is automation the fastest path there?
Leadership knew onboarding was broken — it was costing them channel partners. The real outcome they wanted wasn't automated onboarding. It was making Jive easy to do business with.
Automation might eventually be part of the answer. But we needed to understand the problem first — not jump to the solution.
Understanding the Problem Firsthand
We didn't design from conference rooms. We trained on frontline jobs, ran real customers through onboarding, and listened to the people doing the work.
- Learned the jobs ourselves Frontline staff trained us to do their work — we didn't just observe the process, we experienced it
- Ran real onboardings Put ~6 customers through the full onboarding process end-to-end, experiencing every pain point firsthand
- Interviewed everyone Customers, resellers, and employees involved with onboarding — understanding the full picture from every angle
- Questioned the brief Confirmed that automation alone wouldn't deliver the outcome executives actually needed
Key Realization
"Seems like the left-hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing." That wasn't just a process problem — it was an organizational one. No one had ever mapped the full customer journey across departments.
Breaking Down Silos
We proposed something that had never happened at the company — a temporary cross-functional team with reps from every group that touched onboarding. Some middle managers were nervous. Understandably.
We presented our findings to executives and made the case: solving this required people from every group that touched onboarding — sales, support, billing, product, engineering — working as one team.
Break down barriers
What had been a siloed process and organization needed to see itself as one connected system.
Create a holistic view
No one at the company had previously mapped the full customer journey across departments.
Build empathy across roles
Each person learned what came before and after them. The group admitted to assuming the worst about people in different roles.
Five teams, five systems — no shared view of the customer.
One cross-functional team, built around the customer journey.
I created a private learning journal to keep executives and stakeholders informed as we went. Jay and I ran daily standups to prioritize. Then I facilitated the mapping — leading the team through every process, touchpoint, and handoff.
The Service Blueprint
I facilitated the company's first service blueprint with the cross-functional team — mapping every touchpoint, handoff, and failure point in onboarding. What we found explained why partners were leaving.
Email spam
We were inadvertently spamming customers with emails — frustrating, amateur, and disjointed communications from multiple departments.
Split billing
Hardware and SaaS billed separately — two different bills requiring two separate payments. Confusing and error-prone.
No credit cards
Only checks and ACH. Competitors accepted credit cards — table stakes for SMB buyers who expected card perks and convenience.
Forgotten payments
Manual payment required monthly. Customers forgot, services got interrupted, embarrassment followed — then support calls to restore service.
Wasted handoffs
At each handoff, time was wasted. The steps were simple and didn't require specialization, but involved multiple roles and variable workloads.
Misaligned expectations
Sales promises didn't always match the onboarding reality — not intentional, but customers started with unmet expectations.
What We Shipped
We shipped real software — payment portals, onboarding flows, billing systems — alongside organizational changes. The problems required both.
Software We Built
- Modern payment portal Auto-pay, credit cards, ACH — eliminating forgotten payments and supporting the card perks SMB buyers expected
- Redesigned onboarding experience Clearer forms, reduced usability issues, fewer fields customers couldn't answer
- Unified billing system Consolidated hardware and SaaS billing into a coherent experience
- Improved email communications Consolidated and rewrote emails to be clear, purposeful, and not feel like spam
Process Changes
- Reduced handoffs Fewer roles, broader scope per role — less variability, smoother workdays for employees
- Aligned expectations Connected sales messaging to actual onboarding experience so customers weren't surprised
- Instilled design thinking Support, onboarding, and billing departments adopted customer-centered practices
- Hardware coordination Fixed shipping to wrong locations and wrong times through better process coordination
After the Team Disbanded
When the cross-functional team dissolved, I kept going. I listened to sales calls, support calls, voicemails. Read through ticket histories. Mapped touchpoints in chronological order until there were no surprises left.
The deeper I went, the more I found: games of phone tag between customers and support. PCI compliance gaps in how sales reps collected billing info. Competitors intentionally slowing offboarding to raise switching costs.
The Transformation
From "too hard to do business with" to "Channel Partners love selling us"
Larger deals
Material impact on the company's ability to get into larger deals — partners could confidently sell Jive.
Faster onboarding
Customers got on the platform faster with fewer pain points and clearer communication.
Faster billing
Modern payment portal with auto-pay eliminated manual payment headaches and reduced support load.
Better retention
Improved customer experience from day one meant fewer early churn events and happier customers.
Lasting culture change
Support, onboarding, and billing teams adopted customer-centered practices that outlived the project.
Cross-team empathy
For the first time, people in each department saw how their work affected the next — and stopped assuming the worst about each other.
What I Learned
The executives asked for automation. What they needed was to be easy to do business with. Those aren't the same thing.
The fix required both organizational change and new software — service blueprints and process redesign for the systemic issues, plus a modern payment portal, redesigned onboarding, unified billing, and better email communications. Design applied to the full system, not just the screens.