Client

Common Real Estate

Timeline

2 weeks

Role

Scrum Leader
UX Researcher/Designer
Interviewer
Data Analyst

Tools

Illustrator / InDesign
Sketch + Craft
inVision
Trello
RealTimeBoard
 

Project Brief

Common partnered with UnCommon Creative (Susana Charm, Chris Brause, James White) to conduct full research analysis of their current lead conversion process with focus on reducing customer pain points and increasing efficiency of their Internal Sales Team.

The Problem

As Common is growing quickly, it’s Inside Sales team feels the need to create their own quick fixes to match their customers to properties more efficiently. Information is spread out and not updated in a timely manner, which makes their job much more inefficient and potentially inaccurate.

Opportunity

Common’s current process lacks standardization, full platform functionalities and a centralized resource to enable their Inside Sales team to access necessary information on demand. For sustainable growth, there is an opportunity to design a solution that provides dynamic data in real time, a centralized database, platform integration and streamlined communication to immediately increase efficiency and customer engagement.

Deliverables

Conducted full UX research analysis of current lead conversion process and delivered Insight Report of findings, for improving service design to increase property tour bookings

Designed new Internal Sales Dashboard solution that supports sustainable business growth. Key features, detailed in Specification Document, include data centralization and filtering, dynamic data mapping, automation and feature integration, to increase efficiency and streamline workflow between cross-functional teams.

Discovery Methods

The Solution

The overall goal of an Inside Sales Associate at Common is to match a lead's housing needs to a high priority room and book an onsite tour. Room priorities are based on vacancy dates, a formula derived to maximize room occupancy. 

The new Internal Sales Dashboard was designed to help the Inside Sales Team perform their role more efficiently and accurately, which will ultimately increase the amount of leads they can convert in a day. 

Key Features:

Background

Founded in 2015 by Brad Hargreaves, the co-living startup offers fully furnished apartments across New York, the Bay Area, Chicago and Washington DC, with plans of expanding nationwide. With rapid growth in business, Common scales at a fast pace in continued expansion of their property base and internal sales force.

Research Methods

We analyzed brand data resources and interviewed a total of 7 employees to get an overview of the current process, platforms, and to find various pain points or insights.

Common has partnered with UnCommon Creative (Susana Charm, Chris Brause, James White) to conduct full research analysis of their current lead conversion process with focus on reducing customer pain points and increasing efficiency of their Internal Sales Team.
 

User Insights & Technical Constraints

We interviewed a total of 7 employees in order to get an overview of the current process, platforms used, and to find various pain points or insights.

Though not each of these people were necessarily end users, they all have an effect on how the current system is used and how the Inside sales team does their job. Each interview showed how drastically each department (and sometimes each individual) uses the current system and where their frustrations lie. We documented key findings from each person we spoke with and created an affinity map to find common themes and trends.

From the synthesis of our research, we created a Primary Persona, mapped their Process Flow and User Journey, to formulate our key insights.

Existing Workflow:

Pinpointing the Challenges within the Sales Funnel:

In their current lead to tour conversion process, we identified that the most user pain points and challenges lie within the last 2 phases:

• Lead Qualification & Room Match

• Tour Booking & Hand-off

The inefficiency that the Inside Sales Associates encounter during these 2 phases causes a major bottleneck in maximizing the conversion rate with each lead and the amount of leads they can speak with each day. Below lists specific areas of challenge for our primary user, that present an opportunity for improvement, which lead to our design strategy.

Design Strategy

Before we started design, it was necessary to map out all data fields/links and where they came from, for the dashboard. We identified 5 areas or types of data:

• Communication (Email/Calendar/Contact)
• Filters to query the database
• Static Data from database
• Dynamic Data generated from the database in realtime
• Live Links to pages of deeper generated/static data.

Because there is a certain amount of variation in the tour booking process regarding qualifying and matching a lead to a process, all of this information was deemed necessary, but not in all scenarios. We used this Strategy Map(below) to begin our Design Studio for features and prioritization.

Design Sprint

We conducted 3 rounds of Design Studios, the first round with the Sales and Development teams, and came up will full list of features and designs that could possibly address the major issues. There were a lot of features mentioned but we needed to focus our design on what we would need for an MVP to address the user’s immediate problems and also in line with their technical restraints. The following list of features were prioritized for this phase of development:

Key Features

User Flow

With the final feature set, we were able to streamline the user flow of the Lead to Tour conversion process.

Usability Testing

We conducted 2 rounds of usability test with the task of matching a lead to a room and then booking a tour (as the role of an Inside Sales Associate).

Round 1:
Paper Prototype
2 out of 3 users completed all tasks

Key Insights:

• All users found the filter selection useful
• All Users were unsure if the scheduling pop-up was generating an email separate from Calendar invite
• All users needed additional information (sq footage, 3D Tour link, Cross Streets, Total Number of rooms).

Round 2: 
Mid-Fidelity Digital Prototype
3 out of 4 users completed all tasks

Final Test Results after Design Iteration:

• From 67% to 100% of users were able to complete matching a lead to a room based on lead’s criteria.
• From 0% to 100% of users clearly understood the full functionality of the scheduling and email confirmation feature.

Final Prototype Design:

Further Considerations

Data Field Standardization:
As Common scales with additional properties and team expansion, we recommend revisiting brand nomenclature and standardizing common data sets across global teams, as an immediate next step in laying the foundation for their database. Prior to implementation, conducting an Open Card Sort with their cross-functional teams would be optimal. This would help validate data field terminology to ensure it has the same definition across different teams and reveals how data is most commonly categorized.

Content Management (Admin panel):
In building a robust database across their global teams, future content data updates will need to be maintained by a dedicated team. In this first phase of building a database, we have provided the Development team with data map specifications. For further maintenance of data, it would be ideal to build a user friendly admin panel for a dedicated team to perform data entry directly into the database. This method would be the most efficient use of the development teams time and will keep the centralized database up to date, in real time.

Future Considerations:
Once the new database and dashboard has been developed, launched and adopted in standard training, additional feature considerations could be explored. In addition to revisiting added customization and automation features that users have expressed interest in, there is an opportunity to widen the scope in reviewing a different part of the sale funnel and streamlining the workflow across their global teams. For example, reviewing their lead generation process or tour to application process, which involve different teams as the primary user.