Digitizing Sales Engagement

🎬 Background

Prospective buyers and existing customers visit Autodesk websites expecting seamless, friction-free experiences. But while sales pages listed phone numbers, support and education teams only offered chat or case-based help - leading to an inconsistent, frustrating experience.

😵‍💫 Problem

Roughly 20,000 inbound calls hit the digital sales team each quarter - yet 44% of those were actually for post-purchase or educational support, creating unnecessary volume, wasting time, and leaving customers frustrated.

👒 My Role

Lead Designer, AI Designer and UX Manager

• Sole designer on this project while leading a team of three designers who were working on other use cases for AI.

• AI Design Strategy, Competitor Analysis, Early Concepts, Wireframes, UI Component Library

🚀 Solution

• Autodesk’s AI-powered, digital-first sales chat experience that identified sales vs. support inquiries, and gradually replaced phone numbers across the US.

• Conversational component library centralized reusable UI patterns to streamline handoff and speed up implementation.

⚠️ Expanding the Mission

We were gearing up to launch sales chat, when data scientists who were experimenting with ChatGPT had a model ready to inject LLM + RAG-powered self-service (based on ChatGPT 3.0) into the chat. All teams hustled and leaned into the excitement to get it ready.

• Quickly shifted scope so support automated question resolution

• Partnered with sales to identify top use cases

• Brought in conversation designer to shape model responses

• Collaborated with Legal and Data Science to set trust guardrails (e.g. error handling, turn limits)

🎯 Outcome

• 30% of phone volume successfully shifted to chat within 4 months

• 25% of chats converted to live sales conversations

• 3,127 chats completed, generating 1,056 qualified leads and $625K in billings

• Initial open rates were under 1% - added a time-based pop-up nudge that engagement by 15%

• Nudge success informed a broader nudging strategy across the customer lifecycle

• Education users were bypassing cues — implemented a hard redirect to maintain sales focus

• Component library reduced confusion and re-work across design engineering, and QA

💎 Takeaway

Launching something cool doesn’t mean they will come. A few well-timed nudges drove awareness and gently guided customers toward actions that will benefit them.