Rent Like A Champion
As a UX Researcher I lead a small team to create a service blueprint and customer personas for the home sharing startup Rent Like A Champion that has been featured on shark tank. We interviewed homeowners, renters and internal employees to synthesize visual artifacts that would help their company prioritize the best usage of their design resources to maximize customer experience improvements.
“I was very impressed with Lex’s knowledge, professionalism, and communication throughout my work with him as a UX researcher and designer. Lex and his team... delivered actionable, data-driven recommendations for improvement.”
CASE STUDY: Rent Like A Champion
A service blueprint documents the end-to-end experience of a customer’s journey and matches it to the customer facing and backstage processes of the business. These blueprints are typically meant for brick and mortar customer service interactions but we created a new type of hybrid blueprint on behalf of our client. It overlays the distinct phases from Customer Journey Maps on top of a company's processes. And since RLAC has two customer types, homeowners renting out their homes and renters seeking a home for sporting events, we made a winged version with RLAC in the middle, renters on top and homeowners on the bottom. This allowed us a visual context for communicating both value-add moments as well as the current pain points in the user’s experience with their service. We then explored white-boarding digital solutions for those identified customer pain points.
Presenting the Service Blueprint and White-Board sketches to the client
Research Process
Rent Like A Champion approached General Assembly looking for a team of junior UX designers to provide insight into their current website and services. We were given a project brief and introduced ourselves to the contacts for the project, Dave and Elizabeth; the marketing and customer experience directors. After our initial kick off meeting we agreed that the best course of action was to produce a Service Blueprint of their existing end-to-end customer experience. Rent Like A Champion had pivoted their business a few years back and had then been featured on Shark Tank which had lead to a rapid influx of funds and market expansion.
Since the pivot and expansion no one had a complete picture or shared understanding of exactly what the end-to-end customer journey looked like. The Service Blueprint though typically used for brick and mortar services like hotels and doctor offices, would work perfectly to visually communicate their customers’ journey; and be a consensus building tool for their teams to keep track of issues and product feature goals.
We anticipated completing the research and creation of the blueprint with at least 3 extra days remaining in the budgeted 3 weeks. We planned on doing a few quick iterations of potential wireframes for feature updates based on the insights gathered during the blueprint creation. This would allow them to get a better feel for how to utilize the blueprint moving forward.
A screener was written and sent out to existing Rent Like A Champion customers. Our goal was to interview only “power users” of their product. These were customers who have been using their service for at least 2 years and more than twice a year consecutively. Interviewing power users would give us a picture of what the current ideal experience looked like, even if it included less than ideal moments it would still represent what they ought to strive for with every customer. We settled on a $75 gift certificate to thank each of the customers for being interviewed. 3 Homeowners were selected and 4 renters, with facetime interviews scheduled for the next week.
We then also did stakeholder interviews with Dave, Elizabeth and their counterpart Denise at RLAC. These 10 interviews allowed us to put together a very coherent picture of the entire business process and customer experience for Rent Like A Champion.
In total we recorded 261 unique observations and notes from the 10 interviews. We then began constructing the Customer Journey Maps. The journey maps would be a key piece in completing the blueprint because we could directly apply the phases of the customer journey onto the stages of the blueprint.
Betty, customer support manager, capturing her process
Stakeholder interviews combined as one sticky note process map
Customer Journey Maps
For the Homeowners we identified 9 stages in the RLAC process: Discovery, Onboarding, Booked, Substitute Lodging, Prep Home, Hosting, Restore, Resolve, and Payment. These phases represent the key experiences every Homeowner goes through with the exception that the Resolve phase is added on only when something in the house is damaged or stolen. We then captured unique quotes from each homeowner that illustrated their feelings well at any particular stage of the experience; as well as noting any pain points and things the customers absolutely loved.
The Renters had an almost mirrored experience, with 9 phases but from their vantage point during the process: Discovery, Utilize, Select, Pay, Connect, Arrive, Experience, Exit and Extend. As we began to consider how the Renter and Homeowner phases overlapped we noticed there were actually empty or waiting moments where the blueprint should be blank for one or the other customer. So we decided to focus on RLAC’s steps during those moments.
Service Blueprint
For the blueprint itself we had to improvise and adapt the traditional blueprint style typically created for hotel or doctor’s offices. As a sharing economy business this required three total parties participating at key moments throughout the experience; Renters, Homeowners and RLAC. We felt the best way to illustrate this relationship was by making a winged version with RLAC in the middle and the Renters and Homeowners as balanced wings on top and bottom of the blueprint. This showcased how RLAC acted as arbitrator between the two parties as they interacted across the approximately 1 year timeline.
Finally we added pain points directly onto the blueprint to draw attention to those moments in particular and easily see what downstream actions and behind the scenes actions were taken place around that moment. With the blueprint as visual documentation of what was happening it became very clear what moments along the customer journeys could be influenced to avoid that pain.
Key Insights
The sporting event is just an excuse; the real objective is quality time with friends and family.
Renters were looking for access to amenities not typically found in a hotel, but with hotel-like functionality.
The location of the home is considered an amenity only within walking distance of 1 mile, outside of that distance it is considered drive-able.
There is often one lead renter coordinating the group’s plans and finding the necessary amenities for their desired objectives.
Homeowners enjoy showing off their home's personality.
Homeowners will often rely on real estate jargon when describing their home but that confuses more than it illuminates.
