Dumpsters.com
Enterprise Customer Portal
Outcome: 108% increase in existing customer revenue
Project Overview
Objective
Our team was asked to create a scalable solution to help service enterprise customers. Dumpsters.com began focusing sales efforts on enterprise level customers with a team of account managers providing white-glove service as a single point of contact for dumpster ordering and management across the country. However, as the customer base grew, the only way to grow with it was to hire, which lead to abysmal profit margins and suboptimal experiences for the customer. Our challenge was to build a product to make it easier for customers to manage their day-to-day dumpster needs so our team can focus on relationships and business growth for their customers.
My Role
With a small team who was stretched thin, I filled the role of both product manager and designer. I worked closely with a team of two engineers to bring the product to life.
Team
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Myself as PM/PD
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3 Engineers
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5 Stakeholders
Main KPIs
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Existing customer revenue
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On time payment percentage
Discover
User Research
In my user research, I had the chance to interview customers from construction companies of all sizes, each with its own specialties. I used the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to dig into their waste removal and site service management processes, looking for the biggest opportunities to make improvements. I spoke with Project Managers, who handle everything from procuring site services to managing the project timeline and budget, and Accounts Payable teams, who focus on making sure the bills get paid. These conversations gave me a clearer picture of their challenges and needs.
We also ran a survey to reach a wider audience and get a better sense of the tools and technologies our customers are using. We asked them what they like most and least about working with Dumpsters.com and other rental companies. The feedback gave us some great insights into where we can improve and what’s working well.
Persona Development
To make sense of everything I learned from the research and to clearly share those insights with the product team and stakeholders, I created personas for each key role. This helped distill the findings and made it easier to communicate the needs, challenges, and opportunities we uncovered, so everyone was aligned on the next steps.
Customer Journey Mapping
In our research with ex-customers, we found that the number one reason we were losing business was due to a bad billing experience. So, we doubled down on understanding the pain points across the Accounts Payable journey. I created a detailed customer journey map specifically for the Accounts Payable persona, which helped us pinpoint where the biggest issues were and identify clear opportunities to improve the billing process. These insights not only guided the development of portal features but also helped the billing and information systems teams identify key operational and process improvements.
Market and Competitive Analysis
I dug into a market and competitive analysis that looked at what direct competitors were offering and their technology solutions. Since our industry isn't as tech-savvy as some others, I also checked out similar offerings in less competitive markets to get a broader view. This helped me understand where we stand, spot any gaps, and make sure our portal stands out even in a less mature tech landscape.
Define
Opportunity Mapping
We took the insights from our research and went through an opportunity mapping exercise to prioritize and align on two key areas for improvement. This helped focus our efforts on the most impactful opportunities that could drive meaningful change for both the product and operations.
Managing Active Jobs
Customers were having a hard time keeping track of all the dumpsters at their various jobsites across the country, which led to frequent project delays and costly extended rental fees. On top of that, our internal account managers were spending over 10 hours each week manually sending emails to update customers on their active jobs.
Billing Transparency
Managing the influx of invoices was a nightmare, leading to significant inefficiencies. Customers struggled to keep track of which invoices were still open and how much they owed. The current process of emailing invoices only compounded these issues, making it difficult for both customers and our team to maintain accurate and timely billing information.
Salesforce & Netsuite Integration Flows
To effectively integrate the portal, we needed to connect it with Salesforce for managing active jobs, as Salesforce was our system of record for job management. We also had to tap into Netsuite, our ERP system, which houses all invoice and payment data. To achieve this, I created a detailed service blueprint that outlined the entire order lifecycle, including customer actions at each stage, necessary data points and requirements, systems of record, and our goals. This blueprint was instrumental in working with engineers to map out the API interactions between Salesforce and Netsuite, ensuring a seamless integration that streamlined our processes and improved data accuracy.
Design & Iterate | Active Jobs Feature
Designing the Solution
To deliver value quickly, our first focus was to automate a weekly active jobs list to send customers to provide visibility and save our AMs time while we began building the foundation for the new application.
Based on feedback from customers who responded to our weekly email lists, we noticed a recurring request for a more streamlined way to manage dumpster pickups. One customer even took the time to annotate their email with specific dumpsters that needed to be picked up, highlighting the need for a more interactive solution. Leveraging these insights, I informed the layout of the new page and prioritized our first interactive feature: scheduling a pickup.
Refining the Design
I ran a usability test using Usability Hub on the prototype first with our internal account managers to test the accuracy of the data presented and then with a group of current customers. Based on results from the test, the design was adjusted. One specific change we made came from a few comments that, “it might be a lot to digest if there are a lot of jobs with multiple containers,” so I introduced a few UX improvements, including a collapse and expand feature by jobsite address.
Additionally, we discovered a constraint within our Salesforce system which meant the request a pickup feature had to be off the overall job, not associated with the individual dumpsters on site. So I redesigned the experience of that flow.
Design & Iterate | Billing Feature
Mapping User Flows
As a team, we put together the user stories based on the customers’ needs identified in the research phase. From there, I built out the user flows for the billing module for both customer profiles: termed and transactional.
Designing the Screens
While we were building the application, our AR team was updating the process for invoicing to a consolidated approach. The number one pain point this change caused was lack of visibility into billing information by jobsite, so the focus for the design was simple visibility and flexibility to view billing data however needed.
From the dashboard, a customer can easily view their open balances, filter and review all invoices, and make payments on individual invoices, groups of invoices, or all at once. The key feature of the billing module is the custom report builder, which lets customers pull and sort invoices in whatever way they need. This is crucial for many customers because a key metric is how quickly they can close out a job once it’s complete. Being able to efficiently organize and pay for invoices—especially when a job spans several months and multiple invoices—helps them manage their workflow more effectively.
Deliver
We launched the enterprise portal to a select beta group, allowing us to gather valuable feedback before rolling it out to all enterprise customers in a staged release. This phased approach ensured a smooth transition while minimizing disruptions. Over the next few months, we planned to introduce key features aimed at enhancing functionality and efficiency, such as the ability to share invoices directly through the portal to streamline the approval process, advanced insights and reporting tools for improved job cost analysis, and multi-site service management to better handle complex operations across multiple locations.
My Reflections
Throughout the project, we sometimes had to design solutions that were dictated by the technical constraints of our internal systems, specifically Netsuite and Salesforce integrations. While these systems were essential for our operations, they often forced us to compromise on delivering the ideal customer experience. Balancing business requirements with user-centric design was a constant challenge, and there were times when the customer journey wasn’t as seamless as I would have liked due to these limitations.
One future-proofing feature I was particularly passionate about was waste diversion reporting. A handful of customers had already expressed interest, and we were manually generating reports for them. I recognized that it was only a matter of time before this need expanded, and offering automated reporting would not only serve our customers better but also position us ahead of the competition. However, because it wasn’t an immediate business priority and we didn’t have easy access to the right data, the feature wasn’t prioritized. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pursue it further before I left the product team.
The Outcome
The launch of the application was not without its challenges, but it received positive feedback and excitement for future feature developments. Within the first six month the portal contributed to:
108%
Increase in user existing customer revenue
17%
Improvement in on time payment percentages
8%
Decrease in average dumpster rental time
10hrs
Saved for AMs on average per week