rePUSHTI
A platform to help the travel agents to verify hotel booking details
My Role
Product Designer
Team
Product Manager. User Experience Researcher Behavioral Researcher
Timeline
8 weeks
Tools
Figma User Interviews. Usability Testing Survey
Background
rePUSHTI aims to provide accurate verification of travel bookings for Travel Agencies in order to minimize any manual errors, overbookings, and miss-information issues that commonly occur. The platform allows the travel agents to manually call the to verify the booking on 50+ parameters such as customer’s information, payment status, and trip details in the system.
“With hundreds of travel agents verifying thousands of bookings at a time, we would like to make the verification process more efficient” - CEO
First, get familiar with the rePUSHTI platform
To get familiar with rePUSHTI platform and understand the process of verification we conducted interviews with the CEO and travel agents at rePUSHTI with the following research goals in mind:
What is the overall workflow for booking verification?
What challenges do the travel agents face, while verifying a booking?
What are the main goals and objectives of the travel agents?
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Here’s how it works
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Agents receive a list of bookings
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They find the most urgent booking to verify
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They find the hotel number and make a call
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They update the booking status
Next, we interviewed the agents to understand their pain points
We conducted interviews and usability test with 6 travel agents from novice to experienced users to inquire about their main pain points. We also delved into the details of how they select the booking to verify, and specific instances when they faced problems. We also focused on observing the participants to note down the points of confusion, error, or delays in action.
This revealed 3 pain points in travel agent’s journeys
😔
Have to spend too much time checking multiple parameters
Agents have to manually check multiple parameters like which is the most urgent booking, then checking its current time zone, then checking if it’s available to be verified.
“I opened the booking in the verification list to make the call, but it was not ready to contact (not verified by the system). So I had to go back to the list to find another booking.”
😔
Managing the urgent booking and time difference in the hotels was daunting
As the agents are required to verify booking from various countries in different time zones. Checking current time in each country is a daunting task.
“I searched for the booking that was going to start soon, checked the current time for that hotel but could not proceed as it was not in their working hours.”
😔
The information on the platform was overwhelming to process
There is a lot of information on the dashboard which is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to read. This also results in some important information to get lost in the text.
“I have to read the text to know if the booking is ready to be verified, or to know its verification history.”
To validate our findings and assess the impact, we then conducted a survey focusing on time spent by the agents on verification
Here’s what we found
Agents spend over 15 to 20 minutes on an average to verify each booking
Agents made more than one call to verify their recent booking
Agents spend more than 5 hours a day on verification calls
Agents assess their performance daily
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This led us to three design opportunities -
The interviews, survey, and usability test revealed many gaps in the current design, we analyzed all the pain points to identify the ones that were most feasible and impactful to come up with the following design opportunities -
How can we reduce the time spent in checking multiple parameters?
How can we help the agents in managing the time difference between the hotels?
How can we better display the information on the information so that it is easy to read ?
Before diving into solutions, we conducted a Competitive Analysis to understand how other CRM platforms function.
Since, there is no other platform that performs same functions as rePUSHTI, we studied CRM platforms like Salesforce, TravelCEO, and that are partially similar. We focused mainly on the arrangement of data and UI design that aided its users.
Key findings
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All the platforms arrange the data in columns, making it easier for the users to find any information
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All the platforms provide some sorting or filtering options, allowing users to narrow their search
Use of colors to make the platform more inviting and convey critical information (red - for missed calls)
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Here are our key findings and the new design solution -
Although there were several opportunities to redesign some features, we focussed on the verification page as it showed maximum scope to reduce the time and have an impact.
Before
After
Findings
New Design
We gave one task to five participants and noted the time taken to complete the task on the previous design and the new iteration.
Wait, but how do we know it actually works? We conducted another round of Usability Testing to find out.
Impact
“The time taken by agents to find the most urgent booking that was available to call reduced by 30%”
It doesn’t end here,
We soon realized that the agents were going back and forth in the verification list and were trying to call the same wrong number again and again if there were several bookings from the same hotel.
What if we divide the workflow in two parts?
Impact
From our primary calculations, it is estimated that
“The time taken to complete the overall process of verification will reduce by 10-15% with the new workflow proposed”
Due to time and resource limitations, we did not pursue this solution further and kept it for future consideration.
Other Insights
There are multiple phone numbers on the rePUSHTI platform confusing the agent.
Recommendation
Eliminate the phone number in the “Booking Phone Number” or let “Online Information Phone” override it.
It takes agents some time to establish the right status to update for example “call declined”.
Recommendations
Add a search typeahead for quick searching.
Identify the most frequently used options and place them at the top of the list.
The call recordings are sorted from earliest to latest and require the agents to scroll all the way down.
Recommendations
Sorting recordings from latest to the earliest and allowing agents to mark unhelpful phone call recordings.
Lessons Learned
Surveys vs Interviews
Surveys are a great way to identify key pain-points, however interviews and usability tests are great to dive deeper into the details.
Observe and listen
While working with a platform that users have been using since a long time, it helps to OBSERVE the following questions to find opportunities for improvement-
Do they need to change screens to accomplish any task?
What information is most critical for the users? What do they use to get it? Do they need to communicate with someone else to get it?
How do I optimize the display of this information to make things easy and intuitive for the users?
Is there any information that requires manual entry? Can we automate it/ avoid it?
If we had more time we would -
Explore the workflow and divide it into two parts - hotel verification and parameter verification and redesign the platform.
Test the hypothesis of decreasing time spent in verification process by changing workflow.
Interview and conduct usability testing with more employees with different working experiences and different companies.
Conduct another usability test and measure the success in terms of the time taken by agents to complete the verifications.