Albertsons

Streamlining partner onboarding, support, and collaboration workflows at enterprise scale.

Albertsons Partner Portal (APP) is a 0-1 centralized B2B platform designed to help supplier partners onboard, manage organizational data, and collaborate with internal Albertsons teams through a scalable self-service experience.

My Role
  • Senior Product Designer
Skills
  • Enterprise Product Design
  • User Research & Testing
Impact
14K+
partners onboarded
60%
Reduction in monthly support case volume (1600 → 640)
30%
Faster average case resolution time
78% → 85%
Increase in partner CSAT through continuous improvements

Background

Before APP, supplier onboarding and support workflows relied heavily on spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected operational tools. As partner growth increased, internal teams struggled to efficiently manage organizational data, support requests, and communication across multiple partner relationships.

APP was created to centralize these workflows into a scalable self-service platform that improved operational visibility, reduced manual overhead, and simplified collaboration between Albertsons teams and external supplier partners.

Find the problem

To design a scalable partner onboarding and management platform, I first needed to understand how supplier partners and internal Albertsons teams were managing onboarding, support, and operational workflows across disconnected systems.

I interviewed supplier partners and internal Albertsons employees to uncover operational pain points, support bottlenecks, and workflow inefficiencies.

10+
Internal Albertsons employees interviewed
250+
Quarterly partner survey responses analyzed
1,600+
Monthly support cases reviewed

The Problem

Albertsons onboarding and support operations relied heavily on spreadsheets, email communication, and disconnected workflows to manage supplier relationships. As onboarding volume increased, internal teams struggled to maintain visibility into organizational structures, support requests, and partner management processes at scale.

The lack of a centralized partner management system created operational inefficiencies, repetitive manual work, inconsistent communication, and limited visibility across internal teams and external supplier organizations.

  • Fragmented Partner Onboarding
  • Overwhelming Support Case Backlogs
  • Complex Partner Relationships
Objective

Create a centralized platform that helps supplier partners onboard, manage company information, and collaborate more efficiently with Albertsons teams while reducing manual support work, improving workflow visibility, and enabling AI-assisted self-service support for common partner questions and requests.

The Research

User Personas

Internal Users

Albertsons employee admins that have access to every functionality in APP. (Inviting partners and editing partner details like contacts and documents)

External Users

Supplier partners that are partnering with Albertsons. They only have access to their partner profile and can edit their partner details and add owned vs shared relationships.

Deeper dive into external users — three relationship types: Parent Company (PepsiCo), Owned child vendors (Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, Pepsi Beverages), and Shared third-party partners (Acosta, KeHE, Media Agency).
The Research

Competitive Analysis

I did a competitive analysis to see common patterns other companies were doing for their internal portals. I looked into Walmart, Target, Amazon, ServiceNow and other internal Albertsons products to see how they approach the look and feel within their services.

Competitive analysis FigJam board: rows compare Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Aldi, Whole Foods, Target and others across location, market share, online share, strategies, onboarding, item setup, pricing, promotions, supplier experience, customer experience, points of contact, links and screens. Sidebars summarize Similarities, Differences and Learnings.
Challenge 1

Disconnected Partner Relationships & Workflows

Centralizing Partner Relationships & Workflows

How might we centralize onboarding workflows and simplify complex partner relationship structures so internal teams and supplier partners can more efficiently manage collaboration, visibility, and organizational data across a single platform?

Metrics
  • Centralized onboarding workflows
  • Improved organizational visibility
  • Simplified partner relationship management
  • Increased CSAT (78% → 85%) driven by quarterly feedback from 14K+ onboarded partners

Click here to see detailed flow

01 Centralized Partner Visibility — internal partner management dashboard with searchable, filterable list of supplier organizations across status, partner types, and organizational data.
02 Centralized Partner Onboarding — external partner onboarding tasks list including partner profile, contacts, business roles, document management, brands, and third-party relationships.
03 Simplified Partner Relationship Management — partner overview screen with HQ details, partner type, and a Relationships tab listing owned child vendors like Frito-Lays.
Challenge 2

High Support Case Volume

When APP launched in 2023 with ~300 onboarded partners, support workflows were managed primarily through email. Supporting just 100 partners required 8–10 hours per week from internal Albertsons teams, with 20–30% of requests requiring technical support—highlighting the need for a scalable case management system as onboarding expanded toward 14K+ partners.

Phase 1 / MVP

Case Management

What We Learned

External supplier partners actively used the platform, resulting in ~1,600 support cases per month as onboarding continued to scale.

Internal Albertsons teams spent an average of 30 minutes resolving each case, creating operational overhead and increasing the need for a more scalable case management experience as partner growth continued.

01 Case Management — External partners were able to easily create a case within the Case Management feature.
02 Case Management — External partners were able to add a case title, support topic, divisions and any additional details or screenshots.
03 Case Management — Once a case is created, the external partner will be taken to the case details page.
04 Case Management — External partners and internal Albertsons employees were able to communicate back and forth via reply feature.
Phase 2

Case Management

Reducing Support Case Volume

How might we create a more scalable support experience that helps users resolve issues more efficiently while reducing operational overhead for internal teams?

Get help & resources

Allows external users to self-serve and resolve their own issues before opening a case.

Response Templates & Save as draft

Allows internal users to create template responses when replying to common questions/cases from external users.

AI Chatbot

Allows external users self serve by populating an AI chatbot assistant that is contextual to the page they are on and displaying common questions.

Impact

Reduced support case volume a month by 60% (1600 cases → 640 cases) through improved knowledge self-service base experience.

Reduced average time spent per case by 30% (30 mins → 21 mins).

Note: The reason why this impact is not as high is because we noticed that as we reduced the amount of cases that come in, the cases that do get submitted are more complex issues, which will not make as much of an impact on time spent per case.

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