Fundera Lender Portal

Research I

Since I did not have an understanding of how the portal was viewed by our lending partners it was important that the first step would be interviews with those that did and did not use it.

After I created a research plan, laying out intent, goals, and structure, it was shared with the product team and our internal stakeholders for consensus and approval. The interviews would be conducted over the phone and recorded for reference.

The questions I was looking to answer were:

• What were their most common actions?

  • What aspects of the site do they never interact with?

• How do they become aware of a new lead?

• How and when do they communicate with us?

  • What is the most important thing they communicate?

• Is the information we provide about a lead valuable to their organization and processes?

• Were we providing the flows that users and non-users alike relied on?

• What were roadblocks, pain points, going well, etc.?

• What is a blue-sky feature they wish existed?

Research II

The next step was to utilize Full Story and watch partners anonymously use the portal. This view would provide unbiased information and I could see what the lender partners were clicking on and how they interacted with the page layout.

Takeaways

• They were all power users

  • This made me wonder though, if they were all power users, had they just learned a crooked system to work for their benefit? (Similar to how a QWERTY keyboard is not the best design but we've all learned how to use is successfully)

• Overall there was good sentiment about portal and what it aims to do.

  • Lender partners mentioned that the order of the page (Hierarchy) and actions (Make Offer, Documents, and Notes) functioned as expected without pain points.

• Communication issues:

  • Multiple channels (Slack/Business Email/Personal Email/Text) lead to a lot of time waisted hunting down which channel to respond to.

    1. Continued bombardment of messages from our sales reps were a hassle for the lender partners. The messages could be broken down into two categories:

       • Status - "Hey, how is the lead I submitted yesterday?"

       • Informational - "Here is the document you asked for"

       Status questions were fired off from our reps throughout the day to the lender partners who were processing multiple leads at one time and found it annoying that they had to stop to check every communication that came in, especially when it was not that important. The informational communications that included data or documents that were needed to proceed with processing the lead were way more important.

Ideal Flow:

Actual Flow:

UX Updates

From the research and consulting internally with sales ops, business development, and sale reps I knew that over all the portal worked as it should, just not in the most intuitive way that it could. But the communication issue stuck out as something that needed to be resolved. I wanted to take a light touch approach: improving the UI, adding necessary features where there were gaps, and making a more intuitive, professional experience that would encourage use.

1. Ability to upload document in lender portal

2. Add read receipts for notes

   • I found that our sales reps would ask multiple times for status updates and the lender partners would not be able to keep track of the immediacy of each request. The time stamp would help them sort the most recent messages from the duplicates.

3. Downloadable pdf version of application information

   • Lender partners were taking screenshots of the entire portal in order to get this information. We had rolled this feature out for one partner already and decided to make it available to everyone.

4. Make website URL mandatory in application

   • This was a very common follow up question to our sales reps so why not just include it in the application?

5. List leads in chronological order

   • The current view for all leads in portal did not support this and a lot of time was waisted by the lender partner searching for the lead.

6. Tell lender partners whether lead is renewal or origination in initial contact email

   • Another common ask that was vital to their processes that we could easily solve by tagging it in the initial communication.

UI Improvements

1. Remove icon

2. Lead state is listed above borrower name

3. Borrower name was more important than company name; resizing both

4. Snapshot of lead in upper right corner

5. Offers are listed horizontally for better scanning and comparison

6. Make Offer functionality built into page vs. being taken to another screen

7. Note section moved from bottom of scroll to sticky collapsed window. This the most common function on the portal is always available to the user.

   • All messages are time stamped

   • Messages are more clearly denoted from sender to recipient

   • Each message can be tagged for its contents: Chatter, Doc Request, Info Request, Closing Stip(ulations)

Outcomes

At the beginning of this project we had roughly 6 out of 15 lending partners using the portal. After launch we double that number to 12. By securing all documents and notes in one place we increased our compliance with bank partners and one lender relabeled us from ‘at risk’ to ‘preferred partner’.

A few additional benefits of these improvements: our take rates for our higher end sales reps went up significantly, our conversion rate went up as well as revenue per sign up.