Snapdocs helps everyone work together for a smooth closing

There's a heck of a lot that goes on after you first sign a purchase and sale agreement for that home you're super excited about. Eventually, when it's almost time to close, all parties from the Lender to the Settlement Agent to the Notary need to work seamlessly together to facilitate a smooth transaction.

This is where Snapdocs comes in – at the very end! Snapdocs acts as the virtual closing table that brings these disparate parties together and enables them to work more efficiently by creating transparency, accountability, and automation to the real estate closing process.

The end result is that you can close on that dream home with confidence, knowing everyone is on the same page and things won't fall through the cracks last minute. Hooray! But it's not all sunshines and rainbows...

Finding a qualified notary can be a pain

One of the top barriers to facilitating a smooth closing is to find a qualified professional notary in a pinch – especially in remote areas. The task of finding a credentialed notary and coordinating a smooth signing often falls to Settlement Agents, however, because Settlement Agents are quite busy, they'll sometimes offload this responsibility to a Signing Service.

One of our primary personas is Elaine the Escrow Officer. Highlighted below are just a few of the tasks our Scheduling product is well positioned to assist Elaine with.

Introducing the Snapdocs Scheduling platform

Fortunately, Snapdocs' primary product makes notary scheduling easy by giving Settlement Agents and Signing Services access to the largest notary network in the country, automating outreach to notaries, and streamlining communication to all parties involved. It's a massive and complex piece of software that serves over 150 customers and accumulates over $1.5M/month in revenue. At this time, I was given the opportunity to step in to serve as the acting Product Manager and Lead Designer on the product and to help hire a Senior Product Manager to take over full-time.

Snapdocs also has its own notary scheduling business

It's worth mentioning that Snapdocs also operates its own in-house notary scheduling business and has over 50 employees dedicated to finding qualified Notaries for signings happening across the country, processing over 50 thousand signings per month.

Over 1.8 million mortgage signings are scheduled and managed with Snapdocs each year.

The problem is that Scheduler workload is increasing

According to our internal scheduling team's data, orders per scheduler has gone up by 44% and the number of messages handled by schedulers has also increased by 250%. Furthermore, Snapdocs has plans to continue to scale and grow its Scheduling product offering which should drive even more business, but at the current rate, Snapdocs would be required to hire additional employees to keep up with increasing order volume which is not a very sustainable option for the business.

Graph showing scheduler workload is increasing

How can we make schedulers more efficient?

At the time I was the Lead Designer and Product Manager of the Snapdocs Scheduling business, so it was up to me to make sure we were building product enhancements that helped our business scale more sustainably.

Looking at the data, I noticed Schedulers currently take approximately 7 key actions per order. My hypothesis was that if I could completely eliminate certain tasks altogether, schedulers would be able to process orders more efficiently resulting in a more sustainable and scalable business. Additionally, our SaaS customers would be able to benefit from these efficiency gains as well. Win-win!

Shadowing users

I usually like to begin my design process with shadowing users in their natural environment, so that's exactly what I did here. Fortunately it was quite easy for me to set up shadow sessions as we already have a scheduling team in house, however, I also made sure to shadow several of our SaaS customers as well to get different perspectives.

Because this was during the height of the pandemic and we were a fully remote company, I had to settle with doing virtual shadow sessions via Zoom and screen share which ended up working out just fine.

Summarizing my research findings

1. Schedulers spent a lot of their time typing messages back and forth

I observed that about half the time spent on an order is dealing with follow-up communication. This communication is tedious and time consuming, and Schedulers frequently need to follow-up and remind their clients and notaries to do various tasks to ensure the signing goes smoothly.

I also learned our internal scheduling team has tried to make this communication more efficient by utilizing a 3rd party text expander tool so they don't have to type up each message word for word! They also maintain all of these text expanders and shortcuts in a massive Google sheet which is a lot of extra work!

Overall, there were quite a few challenges related to communication with our current process:

Very manual process - Schedulers need to pop open each order to send a message to the client or the notary, and in some cases, they will also call.
Increased cognitive load - Our internal scheduling team has built macros to assist them in writing these reminders, however, each scheduler needs to remember the macro short code which adds to their cognitive load.
Lack of transparency - It's challenging for schedulers to remember which orders they've already sent follow-ups for unless they jump into each order and check.
Things fall through the cracks - Because schedulers are often times so busy things get missed and they may forget to follow-up, resulting in signing issues such as delays, missed documents, or late scanbacks.

2. Schedulers spend a lot of time maintaining "Do not assign" lists

I noticed that Settlement Agents and Signing Services currently maintain their own free-text "Do not assign" lists. These lists essentially tell the schedulers which notaries should absolutely NOT get assigned to the closing (usually because the notary is unprofessional or makes a bunch of signing mistakes).

Maintaining these lists is a challenge for schedulers AND clients for several reasons:

The wrong notary may still get assigned - Mistakes happen. Schedulers already have a lot going on and they may forget to cross reference the notaries who've said they're available with the client's "Do not assign" list, causing the wrong notary to get added to the order.
Additional communication required - It forces the client to communicate to the scheduler any updates to their "Do not assign" list, causing the scheduler to need to reply back to the client and update their list manually.
Lack of confidence for auto-assigning notaries - Because there's no guarantee the notaries receiving order offers would be appropriate, schedulers and clients didn't feel comfortable fully automating their notary searches which meant more manual effort and supervision required.

Focusing on streamlining scheduler communication

I knew Schedulers spent A TON of time communicating on the platform. To save Scheduler time, I wanted to figure out how to completely eliminate the need to communicate in the first place. I went back to my interview data and pulled out all of the reminders schedulers currently send and prioritized them against one another based on criteria like frequency, impact, etc.

To keep things focused, I chose to start with to two most important reminders: getting the documents uploaded in a timely manner before and after the signing. However, it was reassuring to know that I had more room to expand this to other types of reminders in the future if it was proven to be beneficial.

My hypotheses were...

If Snapdocs can automatically remind clients or notaries to take key actions that should’ve been completed, it will reduce the number of tasks that need to be performed by the scheduler.
If more reminders are being sent to the right person at the right time, we’ll see more smoother signing experiences for clients and notaries.
If schedulers don't need to manually write out the reminder message or remember macro codes, then it will reduce their cognitive overload and save them time.

I worked with my team to agree on a few targets to strive for

Reduce manual upload doc reminders sent to escrow (2238 reminders/month) and scanback reminders sent to notaries (2934 reminders/month) by 75%
Decrease average time after order created to documents being uploaded by 20% from 9 minutes to 7 minutes

Removing the need to manage a "Do not assign" list

The team's second focus was to figure out how to make "Do not assign" lists completely out of sight, out of mind for schedulers.

My hypothesis for this effort was...

If our users can discretely capture and manage their own preferred and deactivated notaries and tie these preferences into our automator search results, Schedulers will no longer need to maintain free-text “Do not assign” lists and we’ll see adoption of auto notary assignment increase

I set up the following KPIs to track our success

The percentage of orders auto-assigned via the automator should increase from 13% to 50%.
Average time from order submitted to starting notary search decreases from 2 minutes to 1 minute.
Median time from order submitted to notary assignment decreases from 14 minutes to 10 minutes.

Reminder flows and logic mapping

Using the insights from my many shadow sessions with Schedulers, I mapped out a high-level flow for how a Scheduler thinks about when to follow-up and send a reminder for the various tasks they monitor.

The scheduling product is a large one, and much of the software was built prior to me starting and with minimal documentation so I needed to wrap my head around all of the current states we support within our product and understand how those states functioned.

I then followed up with a proposal for the additional states we would need in order to surface a reminder to the schedulers right on their dashboard. This would prevent schedulers from needing to hop in and out of each order to manage follow-up communication, so it was important to get this right and for this to be designed in a scalable way.

Exploring design alternatives

After I had the state logic ironed out with my team, I explored several options for how to surface the auto-reminder to the scheduler right from their dashboard.

I talked through the PROs and CONs of each approach, and ultimately we agreed to test option 3 as it didn't detract from the rest of the important information on the screen and I felt this would be a learnable pattern.

Nailing down the wording

I was fortunately able to leverage much of the wording our Scheduling team currently sends when writing out a reminder message. However, I made sure to get feedback from our customers via initial calls and prototype testing as well to fine tune the exact wording and make sure nothing was confusing.

Prototype testing

There were certain areas of the design I was unsure about, so it was important to get these flows in front of users. I built a realistic prototype in Figma and tested it with schedulers and settlement agents to measure friction points and reactions.

My top learnings from prototype testing were...

Schedulers found the dashboard reminder to be intuitive and easy to learn. It was in the right location.
Both settlement agents and schedulers had mixed reactions and some confusion around the "Was this helpful" workflow. To reduce complexity for our first release, I decided to punt on this for the time being as we had other mechanisms of measuring the success of these reminders.

What we actually built & released

Schedulers can now rest easy knowing that the system will automatically remind clients and notaries to upload documents at the right times before and after the signing.

Auto-reminder on dashboard and to notary

Additionally, through research I learned that some companies have alternate processes that make sending a document upload reminder unnecessary. I created configuration options to turn auto-reminders on or off as needed.

Clients placing notary orders now have the ability to manage their own lists of deactivated notaries. These notaries will no longer show up in the system when it automates outreach to notaries. This ability unlocks the ability to automate more notary searches with confidence the right notary will be selected.

If a client leaves negative feedback about a particular notary, they can easily add that notary to their deactivated list making managing these lists more efficient.

Final results

148 hrs

of manual work saved per month

Schedulers are no longer managing communication around uploading documents

Scanbacks return rate

Notaries are more reliably returning scanbacks on time

27%

decrease in notary assignment time

Notaries are getting assigned to orders faster

61%

increase of auto-assigned orders

Schedulers are now able to trust our automation features on more orders

What I learned & what's next

This was a super fun project to get to lead from both a Product Management and Design standpoint. It was my first project I owned as a Product Manager and I quickly learned the importance of setting solid benchmarks to measure success from and working with my team to set appropriate targets.

Our first two auto-reminders have proven to be quite successful, so my next step will be to revisit my research and identify the next top use cases and build auto-reminders for those as well. There's also quite a bit more that can be done to encourage even more adoption of our auto-assign and auto-start automator features to make finding a notary 100% automated. I plan to identify other quick wins to make our automator smarter, such as handling attorney signings, RON technology status, language, and more).

Introduction Problem & goal Field research Defining success Design approach What was shipped Final results

HOW MIGHT WE...

Automate notary scheduling?