Customer Sales Internal Tools

Business opportunity
Customer Sales is a numbers game. By making our agents more efficient, Neighbor could maintain the same conversion with fewer agents.
User problem
Customer Sales agents had no tools. They were forced to cobble together scraps of tools from other teams.
Company: Neighbor Storage
Discovery & design: 2 weeks
Team: Myself and Deb Weiss (Product Manager)
Platform: Desktop web

Neighbor is like Airbnb, but for storage and parking.
Figma
In brief
Customer Sales agents close storage deals between renters and hosts.

They are responsible for a surprising amount of business at Neighbor.

It's hard to emphasize how complex their jobs were before these tools.

We gave them a baseline to make them more efficient…and most importantly, to make their work lives easier.
Jump to final designs
Research and user testing
Deb and I interviewed agents, shadowed agent calls, watched recordings of deals, and had many meetings with the Team Lead.

We also interviewed renters that had been contacted by agents.

Later, we reviewed and tested our designs with the Customer Sales team.
Some of our findings…
  • There are multiple teams within the Customer Sales team. Some for abandoned cart, some for cold calls, and others for renters that had already signed up.
  • Agents have small computer screens.
  • During a call, they might suggest one of many storage spaces to a customer. They had no place to keep track of all these options.
  • Agents are overseas. In order to avoid calling at unfortunate times, they constantly had to Google the renter's current time.
  • Agents might contact dozens of customers before making a sale.
  • Because they had no integrated tools, agents were to jump between many tabs at one time.
  • Distance to the unit is extremely important in the storage business. Agents had to manually guess how far the storage was. It was impossible to close some deals over the phone.
  • Agents had no easy way of judging whether a lead had already found storage.
  • It was difficult for agents to find truly comparable listings if a customer doesn't like one.
  • In a marketplace, many hosts just don't respond to customers. Deals are lost because agents unwittingly suggest an unresponsive host.
  • Agents couldn't include renters insurance when creating new reservations.
Design progression
For over a year I had explored designs for this tool on my own time. For that reason, even the early designs were fairly high fidelity.

These slides mostly represent iterations on the journey of understanding the sales team and designing according to their needs.
Final designs
Agents track deals in Hubspot. We made a corresponding list of leads.
This list will change every day. Agents can remove or add customers to their list any time. They can even create accounts on behalf of customers.
When an agent clicks into a customer's profile, they can see everything that the customer has done, such as conversations with hosts and more. This makes it much easier to get acquainted with a new lead.
Agents now have a way to search for storage for each individual customer. This means they can see where the customer has already searched. Agents can bookmark listings for later.

Additionally, agents now have access to specialized information, such as host responsiveness rate and distance from the customer to the storage unit.
Agents can see the exact distance a space is from the customer. They can reserve a space on behalf of a customer directly from the listing details page. Further down on the page, we have similar listings, if the customer doesn't like this one. Or, the agent can view the host's profile page to see alternative listings.
Creating new reservations is now easier than ever before.
Outcome
While designing, we received positive feedback from the Customer Sales agents and the team lead. Unfortunately, I left Neighbor before they started the build, so I never learned how the designs performed.