← Steve Rayner

The brief

The client's belief was that it had the potential to be a powerful platform business connecting all manner of participants in South Africa’s residential real estate eco-system. To build this platform capability the client first needed to understand existing customer and partner engagement levels and then design for the best experience.

Approach presentation

To get all the business stakeholders engaged, a presentation was put together to set out the business case for the project and sell the design thinking approach, along with the proposed scope of work and timings.

Product and process map

Discovery workshops were held to determine the high-level steps of the customer journey and then map these to the client's four products. The result was a product and process matrix detailing the activities at each step in the journey.

Customer interviews and personas

A representative sample of customers was recruited by segmenting the client's most recent list of successful customer home finance applications into first-time vs repeat buyers according to generation. Interviews were conducted with these customers as well as estate agents and consultants to establish their impressions of the company.

Interview data was collated and used to create personas. Customer personas were each assigned a home-buyer archetype such as 'trender' or 'heartlander' to put them into the real estate context. The estate agent and consultant personas were assigned real estate archetypes such as 'networker' or 'marketer'.

Home buyer journey

There are four phases in the typical buyer journey - awareness, consideration, intent and loyalty. Using the customer personas as a guide, activities, motivations, questions, barriers and touchpoints were mapped to the buyer journey in the context of purchasing a home.

The result showed that the client's pre-qualification and bond products were addressing customer needs in the consideration and intent phases, but that challenges and opportunities lay in broadening the company's reach across all four phases.

Home finance journey

The personas and interview data were mapped to the finance application journey.

The resultant diagram identified strengths and weaknesses at various steps throughout the application process. At a workshop to present the diagram, senior business stakeholders were asked to play the personas whilst brainstorming new opportunities and solutions.

The outcomes of the workshop would influence work on the platform.