Designing A Workflow System
Using cloud service to save time and money of a brand-new firm
CONTEXT
João Batista Real Estate Broker was a new company that needed help to match its consumer’s expectations by delivering an updated service experience to them.
THE CHALLENGE
- The company was new, but one of its founders had more than 15 years of experience in the market, which strongly influenced the firm’s modus operandi. Reviewing the workflow could be seen as an offense.
- In the office, 2/3 of the realtors are middle-aged people who aren’t tech-savvy. So, the mindset of “I’m-okay-with-my-method-and-I-don’t-need-changes” could be an obstacle to handle.
MY ROLE
By watching realtors doing their job, and living their daily lives, I could collect qualitative information from the real world. Observing the office’s workflow was an enlightening task to me.
TOOL KIT
At that moment, even with no knowledge of these tools’ names, I used a rudimentary version of the Customer Journey Map, Blueprint, and Contextual Inquiry to run the project.
EXPLORATION & FINDINGS
At first, I focused my attention on answering the question: What happens when the homebuyer calls?
By accompanying the office routine, I saw how professionals talked to clients, managed and searched for data. After a few weeks, I could see the bottlenecks and sketched them.
FINDINGS
The team was:
• Using paper to manage and store data
(If the paper were lost…game over️)
- Dependent on desktop computers
(It seemed they had strings. They could not do anything without a desktop) - Lacking a pattern for naming files.
(A simple search took more than 5 minutes sometimes…an eternity for the client that was on hold)
Joining those pain points, this situation was slowing down the office performance by making professionals adopt an outdated work style, mismatching their consumer’s needs, which cost time, money, energy, and was also affecting the brand’s reputation.
The sad part: nobody even noticed it before.
DON’T MAKE ME WAIT
- Few clients kept patience while they waited for realtors to find data.
- If the realtor was out of the office, they could not provide accurate information, because if a client calls them, they would call the office to ask another person to get the data.
There were many people involved in the process, which could be a mess if the information was misunderstood.
It was necessary to remove the third man and bring data to the client in a shorter time.
THE OUTCOME
After observing, taking notes, reading reports, and analyzing information collected, it was clear that clients asked about property’s price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and garage. On the other hand, realtors always access maps and data directory.
The team needed to find what they searched for, and also what clients asked most without any barrier.
RESULT
a) After understanding the previous workflow was badly affecting the client’s experience, brand reputation, and also impacting revenue, the firm owners agreed to adopt a new methodology.
b) The solution came with the adoption of a cloud storage system as a test, and an uniform method of naming files. It was an affordable and most efficient way to kill the problem without spending much money.
c) Then the team could access sheets, find files easily, share data with other team members, by their smartphone. This new scenario added speed and independence to those professionals, and they also could provide accurate information.
This new structure helped the company save more than R$3,000.00 BLR (Brazilian currency) yearly, which helped them get traction in the business.
d) The learning curve took less than 90 days to be incorporated by realtors.
(It was amazing to see people discovering the powers of their allies: the duo cloud-smartphone).
