Realhub is a real estate marketing saas. Their online platform connects real estate agencies with their suppliers and provides tools to empower real estate businesses to succeed.
Realhub was experiencing rapid growth, which meant a surge of new customers to be on-boarded by the support team. The current processes were not working and the support team were finding themselves inundated with basic troubleshooting tickets from new customers, who were struggling to understand and get used to the new platform. They hired me as a their first and primary UX designer to help them find a cost-effective solution to this problem. After extensive user research, wireframes, prototyping and testing, I closely collaborated with the team's developers to ensure the build reflected the designed product and all of its features. The finished product is a clean and simple online video training academy, that enables users to learn about the platform and be on-boarded at their own pace.
This project aimed to address several challenges that were impacting the overall efficiency of the business and platform.
When on-boarded, new customers faced an insufficient understanding of the platform, resulting in a lack of trust and confidence, while the in-house support team was inundated with troubleshooting support tickets, highlighting the need for a more user-friendly onboarding experience. The primary goals of the project were to enhance the onboarding process by improving users' understanding of the platform and its features. By streamlining the overall acquisition experience for new Realhub customers, we would simultaneously be reducing the time and financial resources that the support team was spending on troubleshooting onboarding issues.
First and foremost, I needed to get a good understanding of what the current on-boarding and training processes were like. I decided to run some observational sessions of the current training sessions, and followed up with some user interviews. What I needed to find out was: what were the current processes like and what were some key pain-points, what were new customers being trained on, what were our customer's main needs and goals and how did they approach the idea of change and digitalisation given that the real estate industry is quite old school.
I identified 4 main takeaways from my research:
Users retain new information faster by practicing processes themselves with familiar and relatable content. They need to be trained with their own templates, quotes, imagery, branding and in a way where they can "have a crack at it" and do it themselves.
Users are extremely busy and time poor people, therefore they can not afford to spent endless hours learning about the platform.
A lack of communication and information leads to feelings of frustrations, confusion, and lost, which is connected to the fear of the unknown. People like to feel in control because it enables them to organise their work and lives according to what they know. Therefore, it is crucial that users are communicated every single step of their transitioning progress so that they know what to expect and can seamlessly trust their new product.
Support is one of the main elements that contributes to a positive transitioning process, but it needs to be human. People need to know that they are being helped by an actual human being and not a machine. Change is daunting, it brings the fear of the unknown. Having a human hand to guide them provides feelings of safety, confidence, and trust.
{insert affinity mapping}
After some brainstorming sessions with the Product Manager and Directors, we all agreed that the one solution that met primary needs of our users was an online video training portal that offered training videos recorded from Realhub team members. Users will have the choice to be trained by watching videos that use general content and assets, as well as videos that use their own agency material. This will enable users to master every aspect of the platform independently, at their own pace, on familiar content and with the option to stop and practice features and processes themselves.
I designed some desktop, tablet and mobile wireframes and created a working prototype that I used to run some user testing sessions. It was crucial that this new product was as intuitive as possible, and that it didn't create any additional pain-points rather than solving the current ones.
Other brainstormed solutions included:
This will convey a feeling of support and being part of a family that cares about its members. The goal with the Welcome Pack is to remind users that the help and support they are getting is human, and that the family they are joining truly cares about their needs.
{insert welcome pack sketch}
This will enable customers to know exactly what to expect and when at any time during the process, and to plan their work and transfers accordingly.
The Training Academy resulted a remarkable 40% reduction in support ticket volumes, indicating a smoother and more intuitive acquisition of the platform by new customers. 75% of new customers reported the learning process to be very easy. Additionally, the Training Academy was expanded to corporate in-house videos tailored for new staff and team members, resulting in an elevated quality of onboarding experiences for employees. The combined efforts led to a more streamlined and efficient onboarding process, benefiting both customers and internal team members.
Post-project, a strategic roadmap was created, outlining upcoming features such as a welcome pack and on-boarding progress checklist, with a focus on future implementation.
“The training videos have been massively useful in improving our processes, reducing support ticket volumes, speeding up our ability to educate customers. We’ve even been recording our own internal videos to train new staff which has improved new employee on-boarding so much, which is great.”
