Yodle

Yodle is primarily designed to assist local small businesses: realtors, plumbers, doctors and retailers, to name a few. Yodle also caters to franchises and dealers, which is intended to coordinate and make national-local marketing more effective and efficient for companies that have hundreds or thousands of local outlets. Currently, the company serves more than 50,000 businesses across 250 industry verticals. Web.com acquired Yodle in 2016.

It's one thing to manage the marketing of a few locations, but it's an entirely different proposition to be able to do so across hundreds or thousands of individual locations. The platform works to provide insight to help our corporate clients understand what's working, what's not and more importantly why, so that they, along with their locations, can make informed decisions about where to invest.

Centermark was the beginning of understanding the customer experience and bringing value to the importance of a customer-centered product within this organization.  Centermark is a product used by large franchisors such as AAMCO, MAACO and Miracle Ear.  The UX strategy for client portals needed to be re-envisioned with scalability and usability in mind to ensure long term success.

Before redesigning the user experience, it was essential that we address this issue. Client Portals were initially released to the marketing team as stand alone websites to be created for each client. Soon it became clear that this solution would not be maintainable long-term, nor would it to continue to meet the needs of our users. We desired to improve the user experience, facilitate conversations with customers, all the while finding a scalable solution for product updates. 

No Standard Experience

The customer experience depended on varying communication methods determined by each individual representative that resulted in confusion and lack of accountability.

Client to Yodle communication difficulties

Customer support was only provided from 9:00am - 6:00pm ET, when customers were busy with their own businesses, making it difficult to receive help or account services. The contact information was emailed to customers and stored in a not so obvious location in their already confusing dashboard. In addition, many Yodle customers were not tech savvy, resulting in increased technical hurdles they needed to overcome when help was needed.

Customers Are Busy

Clients were expected to interrupt their daily routine to engage with the dashboard to perform repetitive tasks such as rate calls and monitor performance. This is an unrealistic and poor customer experience to demand from already busy small business owners.

Franchisee to Franchisor communication difficulties

A complex or fragmented set of channels or tactics which is difficult to coordinate from Franchisor to Franchise / dealer because of the marketing efforts that are executed manually. 

Ideating a Solution

Our team collaborated with members of the engineering team to explore a myriad of technical solutions. Weeks of experimentation, learning, and minor successes followed; ultimately leading to a highly scalable infrastructure that would allow one person to manage updates across dozens of client portals.

Project Goals:

• Connect the portals to a global template that would allow all portals to be managed with few resources.
• Design an new user experience that better aligned with product messaging and encouraged client engagement.
   

Working closely with users and stakeholders, we validated and evolved the design from sketches to high-fidelity wireframes and finally into a prototype. During user testing, we identified and refined touch points in each design that instilled trust and confidence in the user that lead to increased customer satisfaction.

The visual design needed to balance customizability with scalability. Our goal was to give customers ownership of the branding - while still keeping the portals maintainable. The samples below demonstrate that versatility, sharing the same page structure while allowing for a custom theme.  

Centermark BI Portal

Centermark is a product aimed at franchises and dealers. It’s intended to coordinate and make national-local marketing more effective and efficient for companies that have hundreds or thousands of local outlets. The platform provides a source of shared data, communication and reporting that facilitates informed conversations between all the partners on the network.

Visual Design