Centralized Leasing
A revamp of a CRM tool to align with changes to industry business models
Business Goal
Revamp our software to account for industry changes where leasing agents are being asked to cover multiple properties.
Role
UX Designer + UX Researcher
Background
Knock CRM provides software and services to multi-family property management companies. Our products help leasing agents communicate and manage prospects as well as property managers analyze and evaluate the success of their business.
The existing operating model for multi-family properties was to have a property manager and several on-site agents interacting with both prospects and residents.
Through conversations with our customers, we heard a lot about a new operating model called centralized leasing that allowed managers and leasing agents to oversee more properties at once.
The big benefits of this are cost savings on marketing and staff as well as more specialized roles.
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Interviews
In order to better understand how our CRM product could better fit the needs of a centralized leasing team, I interviewed several customers.
My research plan and discussion guide included questions about current operating models, future operating models, success metrics, and our current product offerings.
“We hire these great salespeople, but they are busy doing paperwork instead of selling.”
Synthesis
Once all the interviews were conducted, I analyzed and synthesized all the notes.
The biggest insight I gathered is that every property management company was thinking about centralized leasing a little differently. I created a journey map that identified pain points and created visualizations for what the different centralized leasing models looked like.
Based on the research, it was clear that the solution had to be customizable to the property management company as well as an agent's specialty.
I then held a workshop to go over the research and facilitated a crazy 8's exercise. This allowed the broader team to join in on the design process, generated a bunch of different ideas, and created alignment on the direction of our products.
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Problem Statement
How might we allow agents to see all the tasks that they need to accomplish at once?
Current State
Before this project, our CRM's main page was a to do list for a singular property that had rows of prospects for different types of tasks and different agents. This works okay for a on-site leasing team, but for centralized leasing agents they had to constantly navigate between all of the to do lists for all of the properties they worked for.
Wireframes
When I began creating wireframes, I really wanted to achieve the following:
1. Allow it to be customizable depending on the centralized leasing model
2. Allow agents to see all their tasks at the same time.
2. Allow agents to focus on the specific tasks that they are responsible for
Design
The centralized workspace allows for a combined property view so that agents can see all their tasks at once.
I decided to call it a "task bucket" view. It now breaks down all the tasks into stacks of prospects. It also allows for some flexibility. Agents are able to filter the to do list by property, owner, and task.
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Iteration
I then showed designs and prototypes to customers and user to gather feedback. There were several key points that were consistent across these feedback sessions.
Agents missed the ability to see more prospects at once. To iterate on this, we maintained the task bucket view from the previous design, but introduced a switch that changes the to do list into a task row view.
Agents also missed how colorful the current design of the to do list. In the redesign, I introduced color for prospect statuses and simplified the agent owner relationship. But in the iteration, I decided to reduce the presence of the prospect status and add an agent avatar and chip to the top right of a prospect card so that agents could easily see who the tasks that they are responsible for.
Next Steps