Overview

Linq’s growth strategy included a partner and reseller program, where agencies and resellers could provision phone numbers, manage customer accounts, and handle billing on behalf of their clients. Until this project, everything was handled manually by our internal success team, which created friction, delays, and made scaling very difficult.

Users & Audience

Primary Users:

• Reseller Admins – Agencies or business owners managing dozens of customer accounts at once. They needed visibility into usage, billing, and compliance.

• Partner Team Members – Employees within those agencies who handled setup, customer support, and day-to-day account management.

Secondary Users (Internal):

• Linq Success Team – Benefited indirectly, since the portal reduced manual intervention, email chains, and troubleshooting.

The Challenge

Partners needed a centralized hub to:

• Manage multiple customer sub-accounts

• Assign and provision phone numbers

• View invoices and apply credits

• Stay compliant with carrier rules

The old process relied on email chains and spreadsheets. It was slow, prone to errors, and didn’t scale with Linq’s growing partner base.

Problem Statement:
How might we give partners control over their customers’ accounts while keeping it simple and transparent?

Research & Discovery

Since this was a brand-new initiative, I worked closely with Linq’s C-suite team and the head of Team Success to understand what partners and resellers needed most. The success team had been manually managing all partner activity up until this point, so they had first-hand knowledge of the pain points.

Key Insights

• Partners needed visibility at a glance: credits, account health, and invoices.

• Sub-account creation was a manual, clunky process that slowed down onboarding.

• Compliance rules (e.g., “burned” or “flagged” numbers) were confusing and required clearer language and better in-product explanations.

I also performed a competitive review of reseller-style SaaS portals (like NumberBarn and agency dashboards in marketing tools) to understand how other platforms structured provisioning, billing, and account hierarchies.

Design Process

I structured the portal around a clear hierarchy:
Accounts → Sub-Accounts → Lines

1. Wireframes & Flows: Early explorations focused on dashboards, provisioning, and billing actions.

2. Collaboration: Conducted design critiques with the C-suite and Team Success to validate priorities and workflows.

3. Iterations: Added features like inline sub-account creation, requesting new numbers with ability to select specific area codes, and clearer invoice states.

Design System Improvements

• Redesigned older, clunky components and patterns to be more scalable, consistent, and intuitive.

• Introduced a refreshed color palette that modernized the look and improved accessibility.

• Established component variations (e.g., cards, modals, tables) that could be reused across Linq products, ensuring consistency between the Partner Portal and Linq One/Blue.

Key Features

Dashboard: Overview of credits, invoices, usage, and account health.

Sub-Account Management: Create and organize customers, move phone lines between accounts.

Billing & Credits: Partners can apply credits directly, recharge invoices, or void failed ones.

Compliance Visibility: Clear number states (active, flagged, limited, porting) with tooltips explaining what they mean.

Outcome

Launched MVP: Partners onboarded directly without success-team intervention.

Efficiency Gains: Manual partner support reduced significantly.

Positive Feedback: Early partners reported better visibility into their accounts and less reliance on internal support.

Scalable Foundation: Portal now supports tiered resellers with seat-based pricing and is expandable to richer analytics.

Reflection

This project reminded me how important it is to design for two audiences: the partner (ease of use, efficiency) and the internal success team (reducing overhead, ensuring compliance).

What worked:

• Early testing with partners shaped critical features.

• Building on existing design system patterns sped up delivery.

What I’d improve:

• Deeper analytics earlier in the roadmap.

• Role-based permissions for larger reseller organizations.

Next steps include expanding analytics (engagement rates, call history) and tighter integrations with Linq’s billing system.