I led a research project into why Rex Reach customers were leaving, then designed a dashboard solution that surfaced real-time metrics and connected them directly to account managers. Over the following three months, account manager bookings increased by 15%.
Role
Product Designer
platform
Saas Platform
Timeframe
May 2023 - July 2023
Overview
Real estate marketing plaftorm
Rex Software is a PropTech company with four products in their suite. Rex Reach is their digital advertising platform designed specifically for real estate agents and agencies. It allows users to create and launch targeted ad campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and the Google Display Network with just a few clicks. The platform offers pre-designed ad formats for promoting property listings, agencies, and individual agents.
The Problem
Our engagement is declining, fast
For a period of time, Rex was facing declining engagement issues with their product Reach. Customers needed to buy credits and place ad campaigns for Rex to see the revenue. However, this purchasing model made it difficult to see which customers had churned from the platform and which were dormant. We witnessed a large number of customers purchasing credits and placing a campaign, but not subsequently returning to the platform. The declining engagement rate prompted a research study to investigate.
Opportunity
Why are agents churning? Can we stop them?
Rex Reach was experiencing high customer churn, but we didn't understand why. The reasons for agencies churning differs case to case. Independent agencies are a lot different to large corporate ones - sometimes it's as simple as someone going on maternity leave and Reach gets forgotten about.
This research study aimed to identify common themes from recently churned customers, in hopes of understanding why customers are leaving Reach & what we could do to get them back on the platform.
research project
Understanding the why
For the study, I wrote up a research plan and then manually searched and emailed 200+ customers from our existing database. I was able to lock in 20 user interviews after prompting participants with incentives. We classified 'churned customers' as anyone who hadn't placed a campaign in the last 30-90 days and was considered a dormant account.
Following the interviews, I utilised research findings to design quick and cheap reengagement activities with the goal of increasing the number of campaigns regularly placed. I attended a weekly leadership meeting to present my findings in a clear and concise way for leadership.
Click here to view the full presentation
dashboard initiative
Turning feedback into design opportunities
Across the board, agents said the primary reason for no longer using Reach was poor lead quality for property listings. Most said none of the leads received were people genuinely interested in the property. They found enquiries were often from people accidentally clicking the ad, living elsewhere in Australia or time wasters.
While lead quality was outside my control, I identified opportunities to improve engagement within my scope. Agents found the login experience frustrating: there was no dashboard showing active campaigns or performance metrics. To address this, I proposed a lightweight dashboard that would surface campaign stats at a glance and provide a clear path to contact their account manager for support.
I presented several dashboard concepts to leadership to get feedback and refine my final design.
The dashboard was developed and went into production. The response from senior stakeholders and the success team was very positive. Following the implementation of the dashboard, we saw a 15% increase over a 3 month period of customers booking in with their account manager to better utilise their Reach account.
reflections
My thoughts
It was refreshing to get the time and space to be able to conduct a research study into understanding why customers were churning, instead of jumping in straight to designs. Although it proved challenging getting churned customers to talk to me, it showed me how valuable collecting feedback is - both positive and negative.