vCalling — an experiential calling.
Don’t just tell your story, Show it!
Background
In the high-value b2c sales process, there are three ways of communicating with the prospect.
1. Telephonic Call
2. Self Serving websites, brochures, and videos, etc.
3. In person meetings.
Now, all these three channels have their limitations.
We saw an opportunity here. Our current customers, who were real estate builders, were facing this challenge in everyday life.
First, we wanted to ease the pain of salesperson who has to conduct in-person meetings daily. He had to travel from one place to another in the traffic. On average, only about One out those Five meeting would convert to the site visit. Majority time of his day would get wasted in fruitless travel.
We thought, what if we make use of technology, to provide the real touch experience, make them feel as if they are there on sales site, without having to be present in-person? It can save a lot of time.
Research
We were making virtuals tours at the time we started working on this problem. Salespeople would show and have a walk through those virtual tours in their in-person meeting.
For clients who lived abroad, sales reps were using screen sharing. They would share all collaterals and have a virtual walk-through of property. But it was data-heavy operation and pretty low resolution one. So, it missed a lot of details.
Screen sharing and video calling were ineffective. Salespeople preferred tedious sales meeting over it. At least they could impress the client with all the material they got.
We thought what if the sales guy could show these tours and marketing collaterals on a call? From that idea of vCalling originated!
A short video of vCalling
Demo video of vCalling, explaining its primary use case.
My Role
I designed the dashboard and calling experience. I collaborated with tech team to understand the constraints and improve the design to keep the overall experience smooth on even low data speed.
A brief about the technology used
In vCalling, we leveraged the modern browser technology. Using that, we can connect two distant browsers so that one can control another through WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication). This is very performance efficient and enables Ultra HD content sharing and co-exploration on low internet speed even. (As low as 3g with 10% data loss).
All they had to do was create a link and share it with their prospect. Upon opening the link in the browser, the prospect can call sales person and they both can have that virtual walkthrough of property, brochures, videos and all kinds of sales material that they wish.
No need to install any app!
Design
The calling flow — Primary use case
Same way sales person books the meeting with a prospective customer, he would book an appointment to have a meeting on vCalling.
At the time of the meeting, he has to follow these steps to start vCalling.
Step 1 — open link generator
Step 2 — Add customer details and send the link
Customer will see this upon opening the private link
Step 3 — Receive call on Dashboard
Step 5 — Showcase your offerings and take advantage of ultra HD content.
Call interface I tried to make it look as native as possible so it is easier for users to interact with.
During the call sales person can take notes, point something on screen to take attention, add someone on the conference call.
Compare to marker, the pointer does not take too much data, aiding in keeping vCalling lightweight.
Additional Screens for customer management system
Dashboard Home — Helps to see overall insights at once
Active customer — reach out to them right when they are thinking of you!
According to HBR research, if you reach out to your customer within 5 minutes of exposure to your marketing content, it increases your chances by 27 times compared to reaching out after 30 minutes.
As one can send vStory pages (a simple page with all marketing content) and can see who has opened it, how much content is viewed.
While they are live on your content you can call them as well.
Call Logs, Link Logs & Customer Profile
Dashboard Admin
Admin can monitor his team members easily.
Design of Team members cards status is done such a way that he can status of each team member just by one glance.
Mobile Dashboard Experience
Mobile Call Experience
Outcome
vCalling was both success and failure. Companies with smaller teams and flexible process were able to adapt it. However, we failed at adoption, because in large organizations they had established processes and vCalling was a radical change.
My Learnings
This was my first product design work. No matter how good UX you have and no matter how good you are at problems solving, but if you make people change their habit radically, you fail.
A good UX solution takes care of all those habits and environment and designs the experience which seems similar to what they are doing, so they can easily adapt.
