A new home to easily learn the system, act on daily tasks, and engage with highly active leads.
CINC
JF Thivierge – Product Manager
Sarah Astrachan – Associate Product Manager
Jordan Costley – Design
The Company
CINC is a real estate CRM and lead generation platform used by agents to grow and manage their businesses. Features include lead capture, automated outreach, and a robust client relationship management system.
Context
A key focus over 2023 and into 2024 for the consumer team was on increasing high quality lead actions indicating a lead is ready to transact. Systems and UX updates were put in place leading to more home buyers and sellers engaging with the agents' sites.
However, despite the influx of leads raising their hands, agents were not capitalizing on these opportunities as well as they could. This, paired with the increasingly challenging housing market posed a big risk of churn.
The Challenge: How might we increase the success of agents who are overwhelmed by the CINC system and ensure quality leads aren't being missed?
Role
I led the end-to-end design process from identifying user pain points through research to prototyping and testing a scalable solution for the web CRM. What began as a simple UI refresh and feature update led by the mobile team evolved into a reimagined launchpad after uncovering deeper user needs.
The Approach
The mobile team ran a discovery sprint with stakeholders landing on utilizing their plans to refresh the agent launchpad page as a home for highlighting leads reaching out to agents.
I took the mobile team’s initial designs and ran research on the web CRM to uncover pain points for non-power-user agents, establish usage metrics, and concept test different workflows. While the project began as a visual refresh, it became clear that agents were overwhelmed and unsure where to start, so I advocated for rethinking the page entirely as a focused launchpad for action rather than just another dashboard.
Research
I used exploratory research to investigate how agents were working within the system and prospecting their leads, specifically for leads high in the funnel. When talking with users, a common theme emerged: they felt overwhelmed by the system’s features and unsure how to structure their day. While the CRM offers flexibility for experienced users, newer users found it overwhelming and difficult to structure their day.
The core page that agents work out of is the leads dashboard which is a data table of all their leads. This requires agents to find the default filter views or build out their own system to wade through the long list of leads within their system.
In contrast the agent launchpad was originally designed as a daily hub for starting their day but less than 35% of agents used the page. Of the agents that did, the vast majority only used it for the reminders feature. Many supporting modules were broken or displayed incorrect data resulting in low usage and limited value to agents’ day-to-day work.
Large portions of the page contain unimportant information and awkward spacing.
Leads lists are a core feature but lack hierarchy while navigating out of the workflow.
Most quick modules provide little value to daily agent activity, often being ignored.
The Idea
After talking with users to understand their day-to-day process, I landed on transforming the agent launchpad into a day to day activity hub. I aimed to create an easy daily flow that minimized how many CRM pages agents had to flip through. Simply adding a callout for leads raising their hands to an underused page wouldn’t be effective.
I introduced the idea of a “Today Inbox”, a structured flow that works like an agent’s digital assistant, surfacing what matters now and guiding next steps. Both users and stakeholders showed great interest in having an easy to use one stop shop for their repetitive activities that they do every day.
Design Principles
I set principles to keep in mind and guide the project based on frustrations with the existing launchpad and challenges agents face in their day-to-day to ensure the solutions I explored targeted the right problem.
Keep it focused and actionable to help agents be successful.
Aligned with tasks for the now and today to avoid distraction.
Each moment focused on specific, related tasks to create a rhythm when working.
Testing
Once I established the core focus for how the page should act I was able to further test concepts around supporting data and content to encourage and help agents complete their daily tasks.
I ran multiple rounds of concept and usability testing with users, refining as I went. The focus was on understanding what information users needed to grasp the context of each item, and what would encourage them to reach out.
Every real estate team is different. Speaking with a variety of users through multiple rounds allowed me to get a better idea of what an average day looks like for an agent. This led me to chunk information in a way that reduced how overwhelming it feels while helping create clarity in what an agent should do to achieve their goals.
Feature 1
Ultimately online leads are a number game. Keeping up with newly registered and recently active leads are key to making contact with home buyers and sellers. This is the primary area agents work throughout the week as they make calls between their other activities.
Feature 2
Timelines for when a lead is ready to buy and sell are all different and often in the future. Setting and keeping up with reminders for leads previously contacted ensure an agent can keep up with all the different leads in their system as they near when they’re ready to transact.
Feature 3
The consumer team worked to implement new flows and call outs to help home buyers and sellers reach out to agents when they were ready. We wanted to ensure agents could easily see when leads were reaching out for more information or agent contact.
Additionally we wanted to help agents gain confidence in the leads to ultimately keep calling and following up with those reaching out.
Feature 4
Trending Leads consists of recently active, medium value activity. They aren’t actively reaching out but they are showing signs of activity that agents deem as valuable.
This offers a place to check throughout the day to ensure you are keeping up with all those who are finding value on your site that you may have missed earlier.
Conclusion
What began as a simple UI refresh uncovered a larger user problem and evolved into a solution that significantly improved agent success.
I set up a FullStory dashboard to track Launchpad usage and adoption as we rolled out the refresh and features. Over time the overall usage and amount of high quality leads being called have increased. The training team now primarily introduces the Launchpad as the central hub for agent workflows.
+35%
>40k