Beyond Email, Rethinking Guest Communication

Product strategy alignment • Lean UX principles • Information architecture • User flows • Wireframing

Discover how building a new platform streamlines guest communication, cutting down emails and boosting engagement with a simple text message strategy.

The Quick Take

TLDR: This project focused on enhancing guest communication at Evolve through SMS-based pre-stay updates. Aimed at improving the trip planning experience, the solution included a streamlined "Splash" page linked via text, consolidating all essential details. A 90-day test across 1,500 properties showed a 37% drop in email inquiries during trip planning and a 63% click-through rate. While data linking issues arose, qualitative feedback indicated a 90% satisfaction rate. The initiative successfully introduced SMS as a scalable communication channel, with future plans for self-serve features to simplify reservation management.

My Approach

Project Splash*

Through our research, it became clear that the time between booking a property and showing up for check in, the trip planning phase, had the greatest potential for improvement. The solution: incorporate SMS as an additional communication method. We would send guests a link after booking that would bring them to a brand new webpage with all their pre-stay information. This page would be easy to scan, optimized for mobile and be built in a way where we could easily layer in functionality as our team grew. Given that we began this project with research, I felt confident in this direction to modernize.

*We called the project Splash because we 'dove into' text as a communication tool. Corny, I know—but it’s more engaging, and 'pre-stay direct comms' doesn’t exactly stand out amid all the similar jargon-heavy projects.

Negotiations First

Some of our customer service partners were concerned that sending automated messages to guests would lead to unanswered questions and ultimately more calls to Evolve. To alleviate these fears my PM and I negotiated to run our solution as a test for 90 days on 1,500 properties only, this being less than 15% of our overall portfolio. We felt this would give us ample data to prove our hypothesis.

Assembling the Design

I divide the page into three distinct sections: the top introduced our brand and our affiliation with the booking site, the middle section highlighted essential check-in details, and the bottom section featured an accordion to house all other relevant property information. After doing some light usability testing with call center folks internally, I shared the completed designs with the larger stakeholder group and handed it off to development.

Property data in Salesforce is still organized manually.

Since changing the data in Salesforce or how the data was structured in SF was totally out of scope (picture a giant can of worms) the design process in was relatively speedy.

MVP design of the Splash page.

Snippet of the new Vrbo guest communication journey.

A/B Testing

For our experiment we decided to send guests two messages at different times during their journey. The first would be sent after the booking was confirmed and the second was divided into three treatment groups.

  • 3 days before check-in

  • 1 day before check-in

  • Morning of check-in

To ensure a diverse representation, the data science team selected a random sample of properties from various locations across the US for both the treatment and control groups. The performance of the treatment group was then analyzed not only in comparison to the control group but also in comparison to the previous year's performance.

Check out the completed user flows in Miro.

Post Launch Buzz

Since our experiment spanned 90 days, I created a trivia game on Slack as a way for people to stay engaged with the project as we were collecting data. Every few weeks I’d post a question and a point value for the correct answer. At the end of the experiment whomever had the most amount of points won a $100 gift card.

Discover the winner inside my leaderboard!

Results After 90 Days 

Complications

Following the launch, the team was faced with an unexpected change when our PM left the company. This caused some uncertainty among team members, but the new PM quickly stepped in and reassured us that she was committed to bringing all of our hard work to fruition.

After completing the experiment, we discovered some promising results, but also encountered some frustrating findings.

Our customer service team implemented a new third party tool that, unbeknownst to us, disrupted our ability to link calls to guests that received the Splash page. Oopsie.

The Data

What we did know is that people emailing questions during their trip planning phase was reduced by 37%.

Results also indicated that receiving a text, whether or not they clicked on the link, deterred emails and calls. The overall click through rate was impressive at 63%.

We also ran a Hotjar survey on the Splash page to get qualitative feedback from guests. Out of 258 responses we received roughly a 90% satisfaction rate.

Take a look at my completed mapping in Miro.

This data kerfuffle was truly a hand-to-forehead moment for the scrum team but situations like these are not uncommon when product, marketing, and cx are focused on different goals.

Answers to the question, “What would have made this page more helpful?”

Another win not to be overlooked was getting our stakeholders comfortable using SMS to communicate with guests.

Despite the data not providing us with a perfect story (I was hoping for calls volume to drop off a cliff and everyone to sing our team's praises) we still felt confident to release the Splash page to our entire portfolio of properties.

Iterations

In just three months, here are some of the updates I’ve made based on our comprehensive feedback loops (Hotjar watch sessions, analytics, and customer service data). 

The next evolution of the Splash project has include self serve functionality, allowing guests automatically modify their reservations. We are also exploring how to integrate this into our website and account experience, which presents a fun design challenge.

Header explorations for rebrand.