Scalable task management

Habito customers are supported on their journey to buying a home by a set of operations team members. They’re given a mortgage recommendation by a Mortgage Expert, their case is submitted to a lender by a Mortgage Admin and they’re then handed over to a Case Manager to ensure they get an offer, their property survey takes place and everything goes smoothly with solicitors.

Habito deals with greater numbers of cases per team member than a traditional mortgage broker and so the challenge is ensuring a consistent level of service across customers while making sure the business is scalable. Habito already had a case management tool. It had grown from a series of spreadsheets and was a step in the right direction although, in my opinion, not yet fit for purpose.

Case Management

Through conversations with others in the business, I learnt we didn’t understand our existing tooling well enough, by shadowing the operations team and working closely with team leads I was able to transform the existing tool into a series of diagrams I could use to communicate where we were to the wider business.

I love being able to start a project by ensuring all involved have a good understanding of where we are now. Presenting a clear view of the now enabled us to identify what wasn’t working with the existing tooling and plan for a better future.

The Problems

The existing task manager was a repeating reminder on all cases between submission and offer, it covered one specific part of the customers’ journey and tasks were fairly meaningless to anyone other than a Case Manager. There was a small amount of automation running, we were watching an inbox for emails from lenders and matching them up with specific cases.

Think of a task as a prompt telling a team member “We haven’t seen anything happen on this case for 48hrs, can you check all of the relevant places and see if there’s any new information on this case. If there is please update the admin panel.”

• Onboarding new Ops team members isn’t easy
• We don’t get meaningful data
• We’re wasting efforts and prompting team members to check cases that have no updates

Approach

Working closely with Engineers, Case Managers and a PM I proposed a new approach to tasks. We’d move from reminders to specific actions, bespoke information for relevant tasks and contextual actions. Tasks should now either be completed on not completed based on what the Case Manager is able to do, we can use this information to better understand where a case is, tailor the Case Manager and Customer flow to this and improve our data.

We’ve designed and delivered these for monitoring property surveys first and will be looking to expand the new system across the rest of the business.

Delivery

We’ve now got accurate data we can use to track the performance of surveyors and use to improve our tasks. If we notice on average it’s taking 10 days to receive a report and not the 7 days we had expected we can adjust that.

We’ve improved the updates in the customer dashboard, customers now have up to date information about their property survey available to them in their dashboard without needing to ask for it.

We’ve proved the concept and can roll these out in other areas of the business.

Most importantly though we’ve continued to improve the relationship between product and Operations, a siloed workforce is where I believe a lot of businesses fail and so, to me, the greatest success was a Case Management team lead telling the business they feel “heard” in a Business review.