Client Ask
Allow potential customers to save in progress applications to increase the probability that they’ll convert
Current State
The client was updating their application experience across all channels to bring it in line with brand and market standards. They were also introducing the ability for their existing customers to save in-progress applications and complete them at a later date using whatever channel they preferred (web, mobile app, phone, in-person), regardless of where they’d started. This gave their customers greater flexibility and helped the client serve them better by gathering insights about their needs and interests.
Introducing this feature for their prospects too would mean that they would be able to serve their prospects and improve their conversion.
Some of the issues with their current prospect experience were:
Prospects had to finish their entire applications in one sitting or start over, wasting their valuable time if they were interrupted or didn’t have access to documents/information they needed
The client had no way of recognizing returning prospects or collecting any information about them
The client couldn’t gain any insight into their needs or interests
The client couldn’t respond to the prospects’ expressed needs/interests and demonstrate how they could help them
Project Goals
Primary project goals:
Improve the prospects’ experience in interacting with the client
Allow client to identify prospects
Improve analytics for marketing to gain insights
Increase completed and submitted applications
Secondary goals:
Improve understanding of the prospects’ user journey
Reduce the effort and mental load for prospects by saving their data so they don’t have to re-tell their story as they interact with the client across channels and offerings
Enable the client to leverage prospect data to create more relevant communications and increase conversions
Improve the onboarding experience from prospect to actual customer
Process
Before starting to design possible solutions, I conducted both a current state analysis of the client’s existing experience and a competitive analysis within the client’s industry to understand what our starting point was and whether they were behind in their industry or if this could be an opportunity to differentiate themselves.
After compiling the results of my research I worked with other members of my project team to create a high-level vision for the feature beyond the MVP. This was then presented to the client along with an evaluation of three different options for technical implementation and my recommendation for which option provided the best user experience.
After receiving direction from the client on how they wanted to proceed, I moved forward with creating user flows and sketches of the solution, which were then translated into wireframes before being passed off to the visual designer and copy writer.
**Please note: wireframes are not shown as they contain proprietary information that is not publicly available**
User flow showing the process of saving an in-progress application
User flow showing the process of a prospect retrieving a saved application
Solution
Our project team received final approval from the client and completed the hand-off of all the deliverables that were needed to build the solution to the client’s product team, but was then assigned to a different project and wasn’t able to oversee the implementation. It appears that the project was shelved or deprioritized as it isn’t currently in production.