Improved Communication
Project Team: Emily Trojan, Ali Peltz, Ryan Dubowsky, Aaron Mast, Raymond Smith, Norman Friis
Summary:
Real estate is hard enough. The tools we use to help our customers buy and sell homes shouldn’t make it harder. As Orchard began to consolidate the tools of internal teams, we wanted to create an environment where communication between several groups could happen quickly and easily. We shipped multiple new features using a white label chat tool that made, joining, navigating, and using our internal chat feature easier, more familiar, and more transparent.
Key Outcomes:
Improved internal CSAT scores (communication) by 15% (Q2-Q3)
Updating Email Notifications
Making it easier to interact with a new platform by meeting in the middle.
A user group being moved into our internal platform spent most of their day in email inboxes and lender specific tools. We needed to create an easy way for those users to communicate with other user groups without adding yet another tool. We decided to update our email notifications making them easier to scan, and interact with.
A New Way to Join Channels
All the help, with fewer notifications.
A simple and familiar pattern but one that made the lives of many much easier. Prior to this fix, users of our internal platform would be automatically added to a channel if they visited certain pages. This meant that managers trying to assist their teams very quickly had many more notifications and noise to deal with. By making users opt into channels, we reduced the noise of users coming and going in channels, and lowered the amount of notifications managers were having to navigate.
Introducing “The Facepile”
Channel member management made easier using the “Facepile”.
Over the course of a deal, many of our users filter in and out of the chat. Some may be covering for co-workers on PTO, others might just be coming and going. The Facepile allowed our users to see the status, role, and name of a user. It also allowed them to add and remove users as needed. The Facepile helped our users manage their channels more efficiently.
Quick Links: Navigate Better
More information in fewer clicks
Our users needed the ability to navigate quickly back and forth from chat and transaction summary pages. The back and forth allowed them to view crucial details about the deal and then communicate any concerns or questions to their teammates. Before this fix, users would have navigate to the deal, and then navigate to one of its child transactions. A small change but considering our users case load this quality of life adjustment saved them quite a few clicks a day.
Never Miss a Notification
A missed notification could mean a delayed deal
While our white label tool supported threading, it was quite limited in its notification abilities. After some creative problem solving from an engineer on our team. We now had a way to alert our users to activity happening within threads. This fix was a gigantic value add to our users and paved the way for an experiment that had the potential to shift just how we thought about “chat” within our internal platform.
