Creative vision for key growth driver of Amazon Business: Shopping with customer-generated guidance
The practice of procurement at medium to large-sized organizations creates a conflict of interest between procurement professionals responsible for policy-development and governance around purchasing and employees who need things for work. Procurement faces a challenge in getting employees to adhere to those policies; while employees want to follow company policy in general, they may not engage in the details if it slows or deters from their own project objectives.
What’s really at stake in the conflict of interest above are people’s relationships, reputations, and their sense of achievement in their job function. (And this is why I love designing for businesses: it’s about finding the path for all the humans in a business or industry with common yet conflicting goals.)
The challenge for the team at Amazon Business was this: the “flywheel” of the online marketplace is center to everything we do Amazon. Given that, how might we continue to enable the flywheel and power procurement professionals with tools to make their voice heard in their organization (even if that means NOT buying something on Amazon), while giving employees quick and easy access to the thing they need for work?
Solution
Traditionally, Amazon Business is a multi-user business account, managed by someone with an administrator user account. The admin can decide who in the company will have access and how they are permitted to make purchases. The basic shopping experience is very similar to one’s personal Amazon shopping experience, by design. That is the experience that employees want to use and are familiar with. Among other characteristics, one of the most distinctly business attributes of the experience is the advent of Guided Buying.
Guided Buying is a configuration that procurement professionals use to define specifically what employees should or should not purchase on Amazon Business, always giving employees an understanding of policy, and a route to a solution that will work for them.
The critical design nuance within the solution was to help employees always know the difference between the voice of the Amazon (such as “best sellers”) versus the voice of the marketplace of buyers (such as “5-star reviews”) versus the voice of their own company (such as indicating which electrical or safety equipment is precisely what employees are trained to use). I led the strategy to define the variation in voice and the rules the system would use, and my team crafted countless iterations of possible user experience treatments to test with users around the world.
Results
What internally sounded counter-intuitive — to allow a customer to self-service define what employees should NOT purchase on Amazon — resulted in the greatest gains of adoption that Amazon Business has seen to date. First, it unlocked large Enterprise accounts for Amazon Business because procurement professionals feel confident in being able to put their policies into the buying experience. Some of the largest companies in the world now use this product to guide purchasing in their organizations. Second, it increased conversation from product search to purchase dramatically because employees get immediate, company-specific confirmation that they are buying the right thing.
I believe that the the financial impact this generated was due to a focus on the root of the customer’s needs — the product allows clear communication at the moment of need between two people who may or may not have common goals, provides confidence in the workplace, and presents a user experience that is clear and definitive. This was an internal win for the team as it feeds our vision: to enable our customers to focus on their customers. It lets people just get back to work.