Orchard • 2023

Customer booking workflow

Enabled sales teams to generate booking contracts 10x faster.

Overview

Sped up the customer booking contract generation workflow 10x by simplifying data requirements, automating key steps, and removing dependencies from other teams.

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Role

Design Lead

Duration

5 months

Release

Nov '23

Team

Me, PM, 7 engineers

Background

Orchard is a real estate startup that offers streamlined services and tooling for consumers looking to buy and/or sell their home.

  • In order to be considered "booked" with Orchard, customers typically have to sign 2 contracts: a Representation & Program Agreement, and a Guaranteed Offer Purchase Agreement (GOPA).
  • The GOPA locks in a "Guaranteed Offer" price that Orchard will buy the customer's home for if it doesn't sell on the market.

For more context on Orchard's platform tools, check out my case study on our product vision.

Problem

In order to generate the contracts needed to book a customer during a consultation call, our internal “Service Advisors” (SAs) had to go through a clunky 15-30 min process that was dependent on a separate team. This was a time-waster for both the SA and the customer, and likely impacted our booking rates negatively.

Solution

Majorly simplify the booking workflow so that SAs can reliably generate the necessary documents and send them to customers in <2 minutes.

Outcome

The new workflow was released on Nov 1. We expect the new flow to improve booking rates, increase visibility, and shorten consultation times.

Contribution summary

I owned:

  • User research
  • Prototyping new user flows for existing patterns
  • Low-to-hi fidelity UX/UI design
  • Concept & usability testing
  • Design system revamp

Co-owned with PM

  • Validating data requirements w/ legal + eng
  • Stakeholder management

How might we...

speed up contract generation in order to remove friction from the booking experience?

Process

This project had clear goals upfront, but a lot of technical complexity because it required rethinking existing contract generation patterns.

Key activities:

  • Research: shadowing, manager interviews, baseline survey to evaluate satisfaction
  • Scoping: defined goals + success metrics of the project and collaborated with eng, product, and legal team to define the data requirements
  • Design: low-fi user flows (established a new contract generation pattern), mid-fi prototypes, final design
  • Release: QA testing, training internal users, monitoring for feedback & issues

Pain points uncovered from user research

The old booking workflow was:

  • A 20+ step process to generate 2 contracts.
  • Involves many legacy steps that are now meaningless.
  • Typically occurs during a live call with a customer — SA is trying generate these contracts and make small talk at the same time.
  • Requires reaching out to our Transaction Operations team to complete & send out one of the contracts (which can take up to 30 mins).
  • Once sent, there wasn’t one clear place to view the contract statuses or make updates to them.
The old workflow was 20+ steps, most of which were meaningless legacy functionality

Project scoping & requirements

High-level goals

  • All booking contracts can be sent within 2 minutes.
  • Internal users are able to reference the latest contract status and amendments through one designated module.

Success metrics

  • Speed - All booking contracts can be sent within 2 minutes AND without depending on another team.
  • Booking rates - If booking docs are always sent during consultations, more customers may book then & there.
  • Consult volume - If we can shorten consults by 15 mins, that frees up SA time to take on more consults per day and improves scheduling availability.
  • Labor costs savings - Removing the contract generation task from the other team enables us to utilize that team’s time on other work instead.
  • Tooling satisfaction - Improve SA efficiency and general happiness with tooling.

Designing the new workflow

I started by evaluating the existing form that users filled out to generate the Guaranteed Offer Purchase Agreement today.
Then, I mapped out a high-level workflow for the new process.
Next, I created a set of prototypes exploring different interaction patterns.

The prototype below shows a flow where the contract generation opens in a new tab. We later decided it would be more fluid to open the contract form in-place even though that form technically lived in a separate tool.

Last, I aligned with my team on a final design flow (4 steps instead of 20!)
Here's a closer look at the new & improved contract generation form:

Validating the design

  • At each step, I presented the designs/prototypes to our tech lead and/or entire eng team to ensure what I was proposing was technically feasible.
  • Myself and my PM had weekly check-ins with a stakeholder group including an SA manager to review designs and ensure everything was making sense.
  • I also ran a few separate concept review sessions with individual Service Advisors once we aligned on a final flow.

Rollout & outcome

To ensure a smooth rollout, my PM and I organized 2 training sessions + optional office hours for SAs, and set up a Slack channel for feedback and questions.

This was released Nov 1 - we expect the new flow to improve booking rates, increase visibility, and shorten consultation times.