Senior Designer @ Booking.com, Local Partner Services Innovation // 2018
Opportunity
There are 180 international offices and more than 3,500 Account Managers at Booking.com. Account Managers are trusted advisers to our partners – they provide continuous support and help them grow their business. They use a range of internal tools in their daily work, but these tools were no longer fulfilling their needs.
Solution
A new development track was formed and tasked to revise the functionality of the tooling.
My role
I was the only Designer in the track and worked closely with Product Managers, Engineers and Data Scientists. Since we didn't have a dedicated User Researcher, organising regular user tests was a vital part of my job. To get more insights into Account Managers’ work and identify potential pain points, I was also taking part in foreign office visits.
Outcome
I designed and tested a set of new tools and improved the functionality of those that already existed. As a result, the usage for some of the tools increased up to 65%, and customer satisfaction grew up by 30%. In general, at least 85% of Account Managers were actively using the new functionality, strongly agreeing that it improved their workflow and provided useful insights in their daily job.
Logging calls, visits and emails
Account Managers talk with partners when they make personal visits, phone calls or sending emails, and it’s important to have these interactions (and their outcome) logged. At that moment there were five different ways of logging, but valuable information was still missing. I designed one seamless way of logging calls, visits and emails that would have all the necessary information.
For testing complex interactions like adding new contact and search autocomplete, I created a fully interactive prototype with HTML/CSS and basic JS. This prototype looked and behaved almost like a real product, and allowed us to iterate quickly.
Designing the entry point
After extensive user tests, the new logging flow was rolled out to all offices and became the default way of logging interactions. The total number of logged actions (calls, visits, emails) increased by 65%.
Chatbot: PS Assistant
Account Managers spend 50% of their time on the road without an easy access to partner information. With this information at hand, they’d be better prepared for visits and have more effective conversations with partners. To provide those Account Managers with the relevant partner information on the go, we created a mobile chatbot – the PS (Partner Services) Assistant.
I designed the visual identity and planned the information flow for it:
Task flow
Account overview
Account Managers weren’t informed about changes happening in their accounts: for example, if a partner they worked with became eligible for a special deal, or if they showed interest in one of the program offers, or if they’d just joined Booking.com. To keep Account Managers up to date, we built the overview page. And since different offices work differently, Account Managers could customise the type of changes they want to see and focus on what's really important.
On average, Account Managers used this page 2-3 times a week and strongly agreed that new functionality helped them prioritise tasks more effectively, and A/B test showed significant increase in our success metrics.
