case automation

Help borrowers resolve approval conditions automatically

worked with:

  • product manager
  • engineers
  • third party project team

produced:

  • workflow diagrams
  • mockups
  • prototypes

context

Many of GoodLeap’s borrowers are approved conditionally. This usually means providing additional documentation and waiting for a manual review. Automating this process allowed us to improve the borrower experience and reduced the number of cases requiring manual review.

23% of all conditional approvals are related to identity or fraud cases. This is the single largest segment, averaging 1,800 cases/month.

To resolve identity and fraud cases, many sales reps simply take a photo of the borrower’s ID with their phone, or the borrower will text or email them a photo. This poses a security concern for sales reps storing borrowers’ PII on their own personal devices.

the opportunity

Provide borrowers with a decision almost instantly instead of waiting for a manual review.

Increase security by reducing the number of borrowers sending their PII to sales reps’ devices.

Reduce the need for manual case review by internal employees.

the process

Discovery

While I had a pretty thorough understanding of our existing workflow for resolving cases, I needed to familiarize myself with the workflow of the third party that we were integrating with to automate the review process. After reviewing their documentation and having a few informational sessions with their project team to understand their capabilities, I created workflow diagrams to outline the transition from our platform to the third party’s and back. This also helped me illustrate the context switching between devices and the different personas involved.

Depending on how the borrower applied, this process could be started from two places - Origin (GoodLeap’s web-based, desktop application), or GoodLeap Pros (a mobile app). If starting in Origin, they borrower would receive a text with a link to complete the process from their phone.

I explored two options to introduce the feature in GoodLeap Pros. The first was similar to Origin’s workflow, where the borrower would receive a text to complete the process on their own phone. For the second, the entire process would be completed on the sales rep’s device. Outlining both workflows made it pretty clear that the second option would be the simplest user experience by minimizing the number of steps needed and allowing the process to be completed on the same device.

In creating an end-to-end view of the workflow, I identified an opportunity to simplify the process even further. We could send borrowers a text to start the upload process automatically by using the phone number they provided in their application.

Complexity: There was a separate initiative in development (Inline Document Signing) that also impacted the same part of the borrower’s post-approval experience. Because both features could be present at the same time, it was even more important to document how the two new features would work together.

Design

Once the workflows were established, I created higher fidelity mockups for all of the different scenarios that needed to be accounted for. While the updates to the UI were minimal, this phase ended up being surprisingly challenging.

Key considerations:

  • Sales reps were already familiar with the existing process, so we expected it would be difficult to get them to adopt a new one.
  • Borrowers, however, likely wouldn’t have any previous experience with this process.
  • When presenting both the new process and our existing process, we wanted to emphasize the new and minimize the existing.
  • Neither borrowers nor sales reps would be familiar with the third party, so mentioning the company by name wouldn’t help drive adoption.

After much deliberation, we decided to present only the new option when the borrower first sees the decision screen, and then offer the old process as a fallback if they drop out of the third party’s process.

Stakeholders decided that we should prioritize resolving conditions when presenting both conditions and loan documents to a borrower. In the spirit of encouraging borrowers and sales reps to progress loans forward, we decided allow a user to complete these tasks in either order, while emphasizing conditions when present.

With the mockups fleshed out, I created prototypes to illustrate the different possible scenarios from the happiest of paths to more complex edge cases. Presenting these to stakeholders helped ensure everyone was on the same page.

impact

After release, the automated process saw a 70% adoption rate

9 out of 10 of those cases are resolved automatically without the need for manual review