Olivera Afife
UX Designer
case study _ customer portal
Revenue-based Financing for Small Businesses: Customer Portal
Company: Forward Financing
Project Background
In the process of getting an advance, after a Customer is approved for funding, they receive a welcome email with the link to the Customer Portal where they can view their account manager contact information and download statements. The portal contained the basic read-only Advance information not allowing the Customer to manage any aspect of their advance through the portal.
My Role
My role was to research Forward Financing's biggest competitors, and design an enhanced Customer Portal that would ensure competitivness, enable customers to manage certain aspects of their advances independently, and ensure improvement on several KPIs such as:
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Reduced number of defaulting Customers
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Increased number of cases Account Servicing department can process in a day (scalability)
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Reduced cost to serve
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Increased NPS score
Problem Statements
There were two distinctive groups of user affected by the redesign: the Customer, and the Account Servicing reps. Therefore there were two problem statements to solve:
Customer
As a Customer I need access to useful information and self-serve features in Customer Portal that will enable me to manage my advance and stay informed about it.
Account Servicing Rep
As a Customer Service Representative I need Customers to be able to manage basic tasks and lookup basic advance information in the Customer Portal so that I can focus on higher priority Customer cases.
Cross-departmental Collaboration
Throughout the project I collaborated with the following teams:
Product Management -- Alignment on timelines and priorities.
Engineering -- Ongoing consultation on the feasibility of Customer Portal features.
Marketing -- Regular check-ins to ensure correct messaging and brand representation.
Account Servicing -- Initial discovery of pain points that can be solved with the redesigned Portal.
Legal Team -- Review of the redesigned Portal to ensure legal compliance.
The Design Process
The design needed to include features that are considered standard across industry, and also enhancements that would make Forward Financing stand out.
Final Design
The main area of focus in the final design were the features that empowered the customer to be in control of their advance. This did not include just displaying advance information and allowing the customer to manage some aspects of the advance, it also allowed the customer to apply modifications to the advance in order to optimize the growth of their small business.
Pre-release and Post-release Activities
In the final stages of the production phase, workshops were planned for Account Servicing and Sales teams to showcase the new portal and give them the tools for the portal promotion to the customers.
In coordination with Marketing, promotional emails to customers were scheduled.
As the final post-release task, the automated customer service phone messaging was adjusted to promote additional functionality in the portal.
