Self-service has long been a feature that customers want, from grocery store self-checkouts to online check deposits. As an institution that keeps its members top of mind, Elements Financial prides itself on providing excellent customer service and continually works to improve the user experience on its website. Elements wanted to provide an easier way for members to connect one-on-one with its customer service representatives, loan team, and investment advisors. At the time, there wasn’t a simple way to schedule an appointment and customers could end up in back-and-forth email chains trying to identify who to talk to and nail down a date and time.
Elements selected Engageware (formerly TimeTrade) as their new appointment scheduling tool. The tool integrates directly into Elements employee calendars, enabling customers to schedule appointments with specific staff members based on real-time availability and preferred format (in person, on Microsoft Teams, etc.). The new scheduling module was fairly complex but adaptable to a variety of business needs, making it a strong third-party integration for the website.
To identify the best ways to integrate the new functionality into elements.org, Elements turned to Williams Randall. We started by creating multiple process flows that outlined the steps and information we needed to gather to direct a user to the correct team member. For example,
Q: What do you want to talk about? A: Open a new account/loan
Q: What type of account/loan? A: Mortgage
Q: What Elements partner are you affiliated with? A: [Your company]
Result: We suggest an appointment with: [first, last name], Mortgage Sales Manager for [your company]
Q: How would you like to meet? A: By video (Microsoft Teams)
We built a tool on the site that quickly takes users through the decision tree above and then leads them to a seamlessly integrated calendar window (powered by Engageware) where they select an available day and time to meet. The tool collects the user’s contact info and can be customized with additional lead qualification fields as desired. Once the front-end scheduling tool was built, we added “schedule an appointment” entry points throughout the site, with CTA language contextualized for each unique location.
The project’s complexity offered a fun challenge for our web development team, who strategized and built both the front-end and back-end functionality on elements.org and related sub-sites. The result? In the first year of the new scheduling tool’s use, nearly 850 appointments were scheduled, and Elements is serving its customers even better than before.