Lead Management for Agents from PropertyGuru — Design Nuances
At PropertyGuru, our passion is empowering people to make confident property decisions. But as a two-sided marketplace, our success relies heavily on the amazing agents who drive our listings. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Lead Management (LDM), a revolutionary new feature designed to streamline the agent experience and skyrocket their success.
LDM empowers agents to boost productivity, close deals faster, and achieve their financial goals. This blog post dives into the design details of this powerful new tool: Lead Management.
What is Lead Management?
Whenever a home seeker connects with an agent on our platform, we create a “Lead” for that agent. This Lead contains all the details the home seeker shared, which are then seamlessly transmitted to the agent through Lead Management (LDM). LDM acts as a centralised hub, functioning as a mini CRM for agents, allowing them to access and manage all their PropertyGuru leads generated in one convenient location.
Why did we decide to make LDM for Agents?
Simplify the agent experience: Agents are constantly on the move and manage leads across multiple tools, sticky notes, viewing schedules, and other tasks. This fragmented approach reduces efficiency.
Prioritization: Empower agents with actionable insights to prioritize leads. Currently, agents receive a high number of leads across various channels with minimal information about the nature and needs of each lead. This makes prioritization difficult and can lead to missed opportunities for agents, and home seekers annoyed by delayed or dropped responses.
Increased Productivity: Design features to streamline lead management with clear calls to action and making notes in one place. This allows them to focus on closing deals and providing exceptional customer service.
Introducing Lead Management
LDM centralizes all an agent’s leads within a user-friendly platform called AgentNet. It’s a mini-CRM, offering insightful data and intuitive features to help agents make informed decisions and connect with leads faster. For some of our agents who receive hundreds of leads, this platform offers a central hub to access and share lead insights, empowering them to make informed decisions that result in a smoother process and quicker transactions.
Version 1: Here’s how it looked in our first launch: prioritising speed and agility, we built our initial version with our legacy framework, focusing on core functionality.
Early Feedback from Agents
We tested this with a few of our power users in Singapore, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. They loved the consolidation of leads. This early validation fueled our next move.
Hive Takes Center Stage: A Design System Revolution
Concurrently, we were (and still are) building the foundation of our new design system called HIVE. You’ll learn more about it in upcoming posts. This new system isn’t just functionally superior, it’s also aesthetically pleasing. The design team saw an opportunity to incorporate HIVE components into the next iteration of LDM. We had a wealth of pre-built elements ready in the system, including bottom sheets, buttons, empty states, a set of cool illustrations, filters, and our brand-new icon set. Here’s a quick glimpse of HIVE in action.
Designers’ & Engineers’ time to shine — Incorporating Hive in LDM
Our design system isn’t just a collection of components in Figma; it’s a well-documented system with most components existing as drag-and-drop code snippets that function seamlessly within React and React Native. Huge thanks to our amazing engineering team for making this possible! We seized this opportunity to build confidence with the product team by shipping LDM on time but with the new design integrated. A big shoutout to the product folks who were thrilled to see Lead Management in its sleek new form, complete with some additional features. Here’s how the new LDM started looking…
Different types of leads with their iconography
We incorporated some magic with illustrations. Following our brand guidelines, we designed a set of reusable illustrations that effectively tell stories across various contexts.
This is how it all came together…
Our learnings — from a Designer’s lens
Teamwork
LDM wouldn’t be possible without the incredible collaboration between PropertyGuru’s finest minds. Design, Research, Engineering, Brand, Legal, Sales, Data, Project Management, Agent Trade marketing, QA, and orchestrating all of this through Product Managers. This project is an example of the power of teamwork and shared vision.
Push beyond good
When launching LDM, we prioritized two key areas: iterating to solve deeper problems for agents and elevating the user experience through design. This focus on design not only improved aesthetics (UI) but also indirectly addressed issues with user perception, ease of use, and performance. The success of LDM was built on the trust and collaboration between the design, engineering and product teams. By championing the parallel development of functionality and design, the product team played a crucial role in achieving this outcome. “Push Beyond Good” is PropertyGuru’s core value. We went beyond simply delivering a functional product and strived to create an exceptional user experience through design.
Be ready. Do your homework.
The biggest success factor of this project was the readiness of our Design System, both in terms of design and engineering. Companies rarely prioritize design changes over immediate business outcomes. However, by demonstrating the possibility of improving not only the user experience (UX) but also the user interface (UI) concurrently, we boosted the confidence of all stakeholders to embrace this visual enhancement.
Take risks. Create what’s next!
LDM represents a paradigm shift. By prioritizing visual and user experience over immediate monetization, we’re placing a strategic bet on the power of design. This aligns perfectly with our mantra of “Create What’s Next” — a philosophy that prioritizes value creation before all else.
A huge thank you to all those involved in bringing LDM to life. I won’t be able to share the entire list but here are a few people. Ayushi Patni, Bibaswan Bannerjee — Product. Anurima Prabhakar and I (Alexa Von Charles) on Product Design. Clement Tan from Research. Mayank Sagar — who single-handedly worked on the Design System with his invaluable mentorship to use the system. Without his guidance and attention to craft, this was not possible. Mayank set the ball in motion for all this. Tanmoy Bhattacharjee and Mayur Dube from engineering. Dibyaranjan Kar, Vishnu Vardhan, Grace Magno, Shivani Nijhwan, Davin Wisastra, Sushant Kumar, Venkatesh DP and more. The list can go on…
Why did I write this post?
To let you know that we are working on some cool design stuff and solving some exciting business problems. The good news is, that we are also hiring designers!!! If you liked this post and wish to be part of our band, hop on to PropertyGuru Careers page and send us your details.
Stay tuned for more design updates from PropertyGuru