Aimco
- BY Gary Buck
- November 1st, 2009
In 2007, the market for apartment rentals was not yet the hot ticket it became in the aftermath of the home mortgage crisis. Aimco, a $1.4B real estate investment trust headquartered in Denver, desperately needed a complete overhaul of their websites to alleviate significant problems their prospective customers were having finding and renting their apartments online. As one of the largest owners and operators of apartment communities in the United States with over 950 community properties, Aimco had over 150,000 apartments to manage, market and rent on an daily basis.
Their existing online presence consisted of a main corporate website with a rudimentary search tool, linked in a wide variety of ways to over 400 websites managed by either the properties themselves or one of several third-party apartment rental portals. All of the sites looked significantly different from each other with little or no regard for consistency of the overarching Aimco brand or customer experience. Worse yet, the digital data to support these sites—descriptions, prices, promotions, sizes, features, floorplans, amenities and community maps—was woefully incomplete, inconsistent and spread across disparate, unconnected systems throughout the organization.
- Deb Daufeldt
VP Interactive Marketing, Aimco
Aimco hired Deloitte Consulting to approach the problem from both the back end (systems, databases, integration) and front end (user experience (UX), branding, visual design). Deloitte handled the technology side of the project and subcontracted the front end effort to one of the large, national interactive agencies. In turn, Deloitte hired me to liaise between the technology, creative and client factions.
After only a few weeks, it became painfully clear to all parties that Deloitte’s partnership with the large, national interactive agency was not made in heaven. At the client’s strong urging, Deloitte severed ties with their subcontractor and handed the entire front-end effort to me. I immediately contacted one of my favorite design agencies, Ingredient, and dragged them into the fray to create the visual branding for the site.
Suddenly, the challenge became learning enough about the target audiences—in a very short period of time—to create an experience that would be a fundamental leap beyond all previous apartment rental company websites. Unbeknownst to our project team, Aimco had recently initiated an internal rebranding project focused on a potential overhaul of the Aimco brand, adding yet another timing issue to an already accelerated project.
The internal rebranding project, weeks behind schedule, proved to be the solution rather than merely a timing nightmare. We quickly synthesized the market research they had performed into personas and customer insights that would indicate the UX design of the website. We also had an instant source of customers and prospects with whom we could interview, discuss and test our evolving design prototypes. (In the end, we provided a significant portion of the rebranding solution via our website designs.)
The insights gleaned from these customer groups, and from property managers who had been marketing and selling their products to these customers, led to a breakthrough design for this industry. We carefully selected content and functionality that brought the best of shopping research, location-based tools, feature search, online sales communications and social/viral enablers to the apartment rental world, satisfying the NEEDS of the target audience rather than merely their stated WANTS. This difference delighted our testing group, providing them with solutions that matched what they were feeling during their apartment search rather than what they thought they wanted.
As quickly as possible, I directed the development of scenarios, storyboards, user flow diagrams and site maps for the new site. By working closely with Ingredient’s visual design team and the client’s ongoing rebranding effort, we were able to rapidly develop user interface designs that addressed the diverse customer segmentation as well as accomodate the customization needs of hundreds of property managers around the country. Additionally, we developed a content strategy that directed Aimco to collect, refine and recreate digital content across the enterprise, including apartment data, floor/site plan diagrams and extensive photography assets.
Because we no longer had time to perform final customer testing, Deloitte commissioned a rapid usability review from Forrester Research. Forrester judged the pre-existing Aimco websites to be very poor, scoring -22 on a scale from -50 to +50. Forrester then reviewed our new beta site as +25, ranking Aimco in the top 3% among the 1000+ websites they’ve reviewed. We made additional modifications based on their final report and launched. Forrester’s summary report included these comments:
- “…redesign of 400+ sites in 10 months is a heroic achievement.”
- “…huge improvements in content and function.”
- “…expect to see significant lift in metrics in 6-12 months.”
In the end, the happy client launched—on time and on budget—a dramatically improved set of corporate, regional and community websites that both delight and satisfy the needs of prospective renters. During the first three months post-launch, sales increased by 16% and customer service costs decreased by 45% due to the greatly improved site usability and online self-service functionality. Both the quantity and quality of leads dramatically improved.
- tagged: Deloitte, Ingredient
- Category: CASE STUDIES