Introducing a self-service property portal to reduce support burden
The Challenge
The customer had deprecated their online support portal a few years earlier but after having reviewed their business and end users' needs they realised that a reimplementation with additional features such as a knowledge base and the ability to raise support tickets was now required in order to improve the customer experience and to reduce support burden.
We identified that the end users consistently made a high number of requests for documents related to the property they were tenants of, as well as minor maintenance requests.
Pain Points 💢
- Support available during limited hours only
- No means to request/access documents out of hours without contacting support
- Inability to view details related to property/properties i.e. status of maintenance requests etc.
The Solution
I came up with a self-service portal where the end user could access information about their property 24/7 such as the lease, occupancy, accessibility, utilities, services, invoices and where they could track facilities management requests.
Working together with the Enterprise Architect, I began by creating a series of process flows illustrating the onboarding process and raising a ticket or request. These were based on information gathered during an initial stakeholder workshop and backlog review.
Following on from this I was able to create 7 user personas covering admin, management, and finance personnel along with associated user flows showing how each user class would navigate the app.
Low fidelity wireframes covered all key features and requirements identified in the product backlog. Several iterations were created to incorporate both internal and external feedback.
A high fidelity prototype with the company branding applied was then created in Sketch and converted into a InVision prototype before being presented to the stakeholders for feedback.
The customer validated the prototypes and other design artifacts and prepared a tender for the development phase of the project with a third party.
The Outcome
The expected support calls were projected to drop by at least 50%, as most requests were for documents that users could now access or request directly.
Key features of the solution:
- Ability to raise and check status of support ticket requests 24/7
- Overview for each property which included floor plans, insurance details, compliance certificates, maintenance requests and associated support tickets
- RBAC (Role Based Access Control) roles to control what information was accessible to which type of user
Role
Lead Product Designer
Work Completed
- Process Flows
- User Personas
- User Flows
- Low Fidelity Wireframes
- High Fidelity Prototypes
- Stakeholder Presentations
