Smart Agents is US based company which provides domain specific books for licensing, personalization and publication to high end real estate agents who want to stand apart from the competition. Using these books customers can build trust, show they are knowledgeable and increase their commissions.

Situation

Being a brick and mortar company, Smart Agents had to do the entire sales, marketing, customer on-boarding, book section and personalization offline which required a lot of man power and customer fatigue. Thus, Authorify was born as a separate online venture by Smart Agents. Authorify was meant to resolve many problems caused by the offline nature of Smart Agents and add more features and possibilities to the mix. Authorify offering can be described as flows:

Authorify is an online platform that facilitates the process for a Real Estate agent to license pre-written Real Estate books. The agent will be able to customize the book covers with their branding (headshot, logo, etc). The platform will also be responsible for facilitating purchases and back office workflows related to purchases. Functionality like automated creation of landing pages for agents and the ability to customize the content within the books will be added in future. The platform is expected to expand into new markets unrelated to Real Estate in the future.

Tasks / Challenges

• No existing design resource available. We had to be hands on from the start.

• Offline user journey broke down due to logistical issues, scheduling issues between customer and agents, lack of documents, quality of pictures, etc. Fix these.

• Abandoned subscriptions – due to customer guilt, fatigue, fear of complexities, took too much time, etc.

• We joined the project mid way, when primary research, functional requirements, MVP features were all decided and done. Dev team had already started building an interface based on a popular web service. Bottom line, there was no time to waste and make do with all that was already been done.

• We had to analyse, validate, question and confirm earlier work and align it with actual business objectives.

• Build consensus between the stakeholders at Smart Agents and Accionlabs team (MVP was loaded with features).

• Find productive and suitable tasks for Dev team while initial design research and rationalization was happening.

Actions

• Design review of the existing research and documentation

• Secondary research

• Competivie research

• Client workshop

• Customer interview

• MVP feature rationalization

• Wireframing

• Visual Design

• Prototyping, Testing & Iteration

Results

• Smart Agents launched Authorify in late 2019

• Some unique features suggested by us have become more profitable than the core offering

• Membership model simplified

• Praise from the client and users

• 50% reduction in customer drop-off

• Customer has engaged Accionlabs for next phase of development