Vacasa is the largest vacation property management company in North America

The Business wanted to redesign the primary tool for our agents to manage and solve incoming queries from guests as fast as possible.

Their business model serves a multi-sided marketplace- both the owner of a vacation rental property and the guest who wants to rent out a property.

As a company that had primarily grown through acquisition, our customer service agents were navigating around multiple clunky and disparate tools in order to help our guests fulfil even the smallest need.

My role was to lead and execute the design direction of how we should be customizing a 3rd party tool to ensure it meets the unique needs of our users, the customer service agent.

I was the design lead for the programme and worked closely with our Director of Engineering and Principal Product Manager.

I kicked off this work by focusing on contextual inquiries in order to observe where the biggest time spent is for our user as they look to respond, serve and resolve the needs of the guest

This allowed me to ensure that I would invest in customizing specific areas that would bring the highest value to both our end users and the Business.

During this process, I found that the biggest time-spent for our users was during the first conversation they would spend with the guest.

It’s highly likely that the guest contacting us would already have details within our system about an upcoming or past reservation, locating the reservation, reviewing the context of any previous conversations and sourcing the specific answer to the guest’s question was a tedious task for our users and causing longer than necessary interaction times between our user and our guest.

I used the insights from the contextual inquiries to produce a Journey Map. This was key in ensuring alignment of the problem to solve for our stakeholders.

Once aligned on the core problem area, as a team we decided that the biggest area of opportunity was around surfacing key content about the reservation, so our user can quickly scan and answer the guests queries.

Using the Buy-a-Feature technique, I worked with the end users to define prioritization

I decided to take a co-creation approach and used interactive workshop techniques to produce a user-centric prioritized list of valuable content.

I also tested this against multiple points of the user journey to understand what content should be dynamic and when.

I also crafted and the directed the UI library

Along with the UX of the agent experience, I oversaw the UI execution of our Enterprise Brand into our 3rd party platform to ensure it .

The largest focus and customizations were needed for the side panel to ensure that this key information was quick to scan for our agents.

During this time, I also worked closely with the brand team who were exploring new typography guidelines

Within the first 6 weeks of launch, we saw notable improvement

Within the first 6 weeks of launch, the “Sourcing Data” phase reduced by an average of 6 mins, causing our agents to be able to solve guest questions faster.

Alongside this, we also heard highly positive anecdotal feedback around overall ease of useAnd due to the success of this roll-out, the Board decided to invest in additional interactions and growth of the tool.

Alongside further formal research studies I also ensured there were low effort mechanisms, such a s Slack Channels, to provide a quick feedback loop