Mortgage Advisor Journey
Getting a mortgage is stressful. Redfin Mortgage Advisors hold customer's hand from pre-approval to closing. How might we build tools for them to better navigate this journey?
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When we first formed a feature team dedicating to Mortgage Advisor (MA) 's experience, my PM partners and I conducted foundational research on Redfin Mortgage Advisor's journey through the entire loan lifecycle by semi-structured interviews and interactive activities like "draw your experience" to identify pain points and opportunities to inform team roadmap.
Time
Q1 2021
Team
Yuchen Tong
Evan Kutter (PM)
Bennett Juwvipart (PM)
Support
Lorelei Lin (UX Researcher)
My Role
User interview, affinity diagram, journey mapping, storytelling
We want to get "ingredients" through creative and diverse activities.
We co-created this journey map.
Ask:
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 8 Mortgage Advisors and 4 Associate Mortgage Advisors (AMAs) who are assistants to MAs.
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They have walked us through how they start their day as an MA and how they help customers navigate the entire loan process. They highlight key issues in their process and provide insights for design improvements.
Draw...
We asked MAs and AMAs to visualize their journey with a pen and paper.
This creative exercise helped us debunk our assumptions and revealed how MAs conceive of and order their experience.
Align
Each MA's process can be different.
I mapped all the drawings to identify essential steps and common patterns in their process to help us create a holistic journey map.
Cluster
I used affinity diagrams to identify themes from our interviews and reveal connected design opportunities.
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Map
I integrated the drawings and quotes from interviews into an end-to-end journey, where I summarized and mapped key pain points and opportunities and provided supportive quantitative data as well.
Iterate
I shared the journey map v.1 with the broader mortgage product team for feedback. We together identified cross-team opportunities and future research questions.
Mortgage advisor's pain points through out the entire loan cycle.
We identified 5 top areas for improvement.
How are we planning to solve those problem?
Come up with a roadmap to address each problem areas.
CRM: the top ask
CRM has been deprioritized since our underwriting team was overwhelmed by the volume from top of funnel. But CRM is critical to MA's sales nature and seems necessary at that moment as we scale.
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We quickly moved forward with this idea and conducted additional research to build a consolidated page for MAs to manage customers at all stages in one place.
Email: automation
We created and embedded email templates in our internal tools to make email communication easier. We also worked with product marketing team on utilizing the third party customer engagement tools our brokerage was using for email automation to nourish more business leads.
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We also redesigned our notes section in internal tools for better internal communication.
The pipeline
Mortgage advisors are specialized at and passionate about the sale part of business. But lots of their time were eaten by checking loan status, communicate status, and driving the underwriting team.
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We explored some software opportunities to make tracking easier, but ended up realizing we need to improve the process. We worked with program management and leaders in the field to make sure loan status move smoothly, so MAs can focus on the top of funnel.
Documents
Mortgage is document heavy. But loan processors instead of MAs are the heaviest user of our document tool. Our sister team working on processor's experience take over and continue to improve document upload and intake experience.
