Agent Portal - Urgent referral leads overview

Agent portal is a dashboard for real estate agents to manage their client relationship status, generate new leads, open escrow, and more.

The initial experience was designed to be desktop first which resulted in low engagement on mobile, low task completion, and poor usability. As we continued to give more leads to agents, agents were frustrated that there isn’t a function for the bulk stage update and nurture stage. Additionally, the referral detail screen wasn’t designed to scale.

 

Problem 1:
Lead stage updates are how the business model out how much expected revenue a lead will generate. After the “agent left voicemail stage”, lead stage updates are made by the agent. However, agents are notorious for not providing or updating us on their leads.

Problem 2:
There is no nurture stage that agents can move clients into the “client is not ready to transact”, and that same lead pops into their referral task list every month. This causes hundreds of leads to pile up in their urgent referral task list and eventually agents just ignore the communication all together.

 

Risks and Consideration

By making it incredibly easy to update lead stages, agent’s may take advantage of this and simply update all of their leads to “meeting scheduled” without honestly scheduling a meeting. We’ll need to consider how often agents are abusing this, and how to catch agents that are gamifying their conversion.

 
 

I was the lead designer on this project from Q1 2024 - End of Feb 2024. I ideated early concepts, presented regularly to leadership, and delivered final assets for production. I worked with a team of 1 product managers and 3 engineers.

 

Goals

User: Make it incredibly simple for our agents to bulk update lead stages, nurture buyers/sellers who are not ready to transact and make the app more accessible.

Business: Reduce the amount of urgent referrals each agent currently has so that the business can model out how much-expected revenue a lead will generate and increase mobile app engagement.

Product: Set up a cadence of follow-up that does not overwhelm the agent with notifications and makes
it much easier for agents to provide feedback and update stages.

 

Research

I used the “Job To Be Done” framework to understand agents' processes, how they interact with the Agent Dashboard, how often they communicate with their buyers/sellers, and their challenges.

Interview questions:

  1. Are there other tools or systems you use to streamline communication across different buyers/sellers?

  2. How do you schedule tours for your buyers/sellers?

  3. What are some things that you always do when you conduct the tour? Where do you note down decisions or feedback from your buyers/sellers for the property?

  4. How do you denote progress for your buyers/sellers?

  5. How do you know if you’re doing a good job helping your buyers/sellers in their search?

We asked engineers to log in user events so that we can use periscope to monitor the “start” and “completed” rate.

Looks like individually, agents that start one update, at least finish one. However, looks like they click start many more times.

Perhaps this differs by platform. Maybe it does not present itself in this way on Desktop Web, but it does on Mobile Web. 

 

Design explorations

 

What we’ve learned - referral detail

We conducted rounds of user interviews with our network of agents and customer success to validate designs and iterated based on feedback. We launched the product with 10%-30%-50%-70%-100% increment to see how agents interact with the new design.

 

Referral detail

 

Bulk updates

Agents were notorious for not providing or updating us on their leads. We added bulk updates function and substage to make it easier for agents to make updates.

Internal Sales Dashboard

After Agents make the updates, our internal Sales Relationship Manager can easily see the status of their agents’ status with their clients. It reduced SRM’s time to call their agent individually to understand what steps in the process their clients are in and manually update the stages.

 

Single stage updates

Certain stages like “Coming Soon”, “Listing”, and “In Escrow” can’t be bulk updated because it requires the agent to pick a date.

 

Result

We've seen a 60% increase in engagement as a direct result of shipping this feature. Agents spent way less time updating their referral leads. With the added substage, agents can now make the lead to be on hold until follow-up date. Moreover, we’ve seen an uptake of agent using the app.