Story mapping, research, and competitive analysis
When I started the project., we knew anecdotally that agents didn't have the best perception of Opendoor, but we had never done formal research with agents. We initially set out to get a baseline understanding of workflows, perceptions, and interactions of agents who worked with Opendoor. We also wanted to validate or invalidate our working hypotheses. We did a set of interviews with our high and low performing agents, as well as some brokerages we worked with.
I also led a few workshops with our internal agent team to get an understanding of the current process and what pain points there were. The process had been passed down through operators with tribal knowledge of how different partners behaved, but no one had mapped it all together before. The current process was bespoke and highly individualized. We were able to unlock many commonalities and areas we could streamline for our operations, which would later help us scale.
Lastly, I took a look at our existing competitors and identified the types of messaging they were using as well as their economic models for agents.
Research findings
Goals
✅ Get a baseline understanding of how agents work with Opendoor and what their perceptions of Opendoor are
Develop and execute a strategy for growing the agent channel for the core seller product at Opendoor
Working hypotheses
❌ We can recreate the success we have with the brokerage Mark Spain
🟡 Improved agent perception coupled with a top-down corporate level partnership with major brokerages will help us scale the agent channel
1. Our biggest brokerage, Mark Spain, was only successful with our customers because they were using identical marketing messages. Customers were self-selecting as interested in direct cash offers, and therefore inherently interested in Opendoor. This finding meant we had to learn how to get more agents and traditional brokerages to partner with us.
2. Agents didn't trust Opendoor. We originally thought that agents were so independent that they wouldn't trust their brokerage to recommend us. However, upon talking with agents, we found that being endorsed by the brokerage as a whole was actually a huge trust builder.
3. Opendoor's process added a lot of overhead for agents, and they made less money through Opendoor. We knew we needed to add incentives and streamline the process to make it more appealing for agents.
4. In a subsequent survey, we measured agents' awareness of Opendoor as a whole. We also asked them which features they would be most interested in that we were already offering. What we learned was that agents had very little awareness of Opendoor's offerings and upon learning about Opendoor's offerings, they were pleasantly surprised.
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Agent vision - getting buy in
Based on the research findings, we put together an agent vision to help our teammates understand what the agent channel could look like in the future. We painted the picture of agents who were clamoring to work with Opendoor. We used this vision to pitch our leadership on the overall agent strategy and to get buy in to start executing against the strategy. There were 3 main areas we wanted to chase:
A streamlined process
Another major pain point for agents was that the Opendoor process added a lot of overhead for them. We pitched changing the process by adding a way to manage multiple clients. We also proposed repurposing parts of the existing customer flow to get more efficiency for agents with a low cost.
Loyalty program & incentives
We also saw in our competitive research that other companies were introducing loyalty programs for agents. Since part of the pitch for working with Opendoor was getting more volume, we decided to base our loyalty program on how many transactions agents did with Opendoor.
Agent value props
Though we had a hypothesis that agents weren't aware of Opendoor and its offerings, we wanted to be sure. A follow up quantitative study revealed that 25% of agents didn't know Opendoor had a program for them. Around 35% of agents didn't know that we offered a 1% referral bonus for having their clients sell to Opendoor. We proposed a new landing page, as well as value props sprinkled throughout the product to raise awareness about Opendoor's product offerings with agents.
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Shipping the strategy
Once we got buy in for the vision, we scoped out the things that were harder to control in the product and prioritized things we could do in a short time frame that would give us the most value. We had other priorities on the team, so we had to be strategic about what we took on within the quarter.
[chart of value & effort]
Part 1: Agent value props
We did an audit of the agent experience in product and marketing materials to identify where to surface value props to raise awareness with agents. We landed on some contextual placements for value props, and shipped the experiment in May 2021.
Part 2: streamlining the agent flow
The walkthrough experience for agents was done in google docs and email. It took agents an average of 2 days to finish their client's walkthrough. We repurposed the existing customer walkthrough experience and used it for our agent population. The project was low effort but saved our agents an average of 48 hours per transaction.
Part 3: loyalty program
We had a strong hypothesis around a loyalty program, but it was still just a hypothesis. Before we invested any design resources into the loyalty program, we put together an email campaign and piloted with the ops team. After getting positive signal on the project, the team developed new landing pages and an automated points system.
Results & evolution
Goals
✅ Get a baseline understanding of how agents work with Opendoor and what their perceptions of Opendoor are
✅ Develop and execute a strategy for growing the agent channel for the core seller product at Opendoor
Results
✅ Raised awareness with teammates and got buy in from leadership that the agent channel was worth investing in
✅ After 3 months of these changes, the agent channel became the fastest growing channel at Opendoor. It accounted for 20% of contracts
