Spring 2022
AppFolio
Reducing churn for a vital applicant screening service through an improved workflow.
Spring 2022
Reducing churn for a vital applicant screening service through an improved workflow.
AppFolio is a comprehensive property management platform that provides solutions for everything from listing properties to internal bookkeeping for its users. My work in the applicant screening space focused on rental applications and income verification.
30% of all customers that churned from the income verification service did so for the same reason—the service automatically ran on each application and customers ended up paying for income reports they didn't need. We were to come up with an alternative to the existing solution and ensure it still allowed us to hit our revenue targets.
User Experience Designer
As we would essentially be designing a way for customers to get charged less, we needed to ensure that the solution we delivered wouldn't seriously impact revenue.
We accounted for this by developing our solution in a closed environment and allowing customers that had previously churned from the product to come back and test it over a period of time, while we monitored the difference in income reports ran and the corresponding difference in revenue.
User story
Imagine you're a property manager (yes, you). You list a property to rent and before you can even blink you have ten prospective renters submit applications. You quickly close the listing so you can review the applications before more start to come in.
Since you are an ethical property manager, you work on a strict first come first serve basis. You review the first application and low and behold its a perfect match—great credit score, income is 3x the rent, and no criminal history. You approve the application, but now you're left with nine other applications you that you wont even look at. Not only that, but you paid for income verification reports for each application.
This infuriates you, and eventually it simply costs too much to continue paying for. You leave the service.
Hypothesis
We started with a simple idea—we would allow property managers the option to manually send an income verification link to applicants after they submit their application, opposed to applicants being prompted to fill it out in the rental application. This would allow them to pay for the service on an a la carte basis.
Whether or not this would prove successful would require our understanding of the following:
User interviews
We spoke to 31 property managers across all of our customer demographics (based on rental unit count). Each customer we spoke to fit one of the following three criteria:
Discovery results
Ultimately we learned that:
We were not able to discern the possible business impact just by talking to users. With our hypothesis validated, we resolved to test our solution as a beta, inviting customers that had already churned to gauge their response. We would then add an option for the rest of our customers to enroll if the initial response was positive.
Enablement
We didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so we worked with what our users already knew. The two places where customers could sign up for income verification were the AppFolio Marketplace and the Screening Policies page.
The AppFolio Marketplace would allow new income verification customers to sign up for the first time with the workflow that worked best for them. The screening policies page also allowed new users to sign, along with the ability for existing users to adjust the way they used the service.
How it works
Once enabled, an option to request an income report was slotted into an existing confirmation modal that appeared when a customer chose to run a credit, eviction, and criminal report.
Previously this modal just served to confirm that the property manager was requesting a credit, eviction, criminal report, but now we gave them the option to select both or either to run.
If they chose not to request either report, they would still have the option to do so in the screening reports block. They could also re-send a request if the report that came back was inconclusive. We also added a hover tip to explain what was happening to the customer and to set an expectation of when a report would be made available (this was guaranteed by our backend).
The screening block on the rental application was also updated alongside the modal to account for the new flow. An actions log was also added for audit purposes and to provide transparency on what was happening behind the scenes.
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We invited 27 customers who all churned from income verification to participate in the beta. We monitored how often they ran reports and compared that to how often reports were ran by the rest of our customers. After three weeks on the beta, we interviewed 8 customers to see what they thought. Our findings were as follows:
1. Fewer income reports were being ran, but not enough to make a sizeable impact to the business.
2. Customers had an overwhelmingly positive response to the new flow, all of them opted to stay on the beta after the trial month.
3. The way we fit the new flow into the existing workflow of the users was simple and intuitive.
Once we opened the beta up to all AppFolio customers, our sample group doubled in a week and continued to grow at an incredible rate. To us, this meant that we had adequately accounted for a problem that was troubling lots of users, and they were greatly excited by our new workflow.
After four months, churn reduced by 12% as a result of our solution.
Something else that we hadn't expected was that initial adoption of the income verification service grew by 20%, meaning we had uncovered a large blocker to adoption and solved for it.
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