Q2 Cloud Lending (formerly Cloud Lending) is one of the highest volume resellers of Salesforce in the financial sector. It offers a complete loan processing and servicing platform that integrates with thousands of other enterprise applications as part of the Salesforce AppExchange ecosystem. Origination (application intake and underwriting) is the companies biggest revenue generator but was starting to see diminished sales and unwanted churn. The business recognized that to keep up its momentum, it was going to need to evolve its strategy.

I was also working to introduce UX into an organization with no prior design involvement. Both leadership and I shared the expectation that UX should be an integral component of our business strategy, and we aimed for measurable, positive impacts on our business outcomes.

Also given that most Product Owners came from a banking background and were unaccustomed to a user-centered design approach, bridging this gap was essential. Additionally, many members of the engineering team had never collaborated with UX designers before, necessitating a shift in mindset and workflows.

It was clear that simply updating the UI would not suffice and there were underlying systemic issues that needed to be addressed including information architecture, design patterns, and flows. Additionally, there was a lack of collective knowledge about the individuals responsible for processing loans.
‍
Another hurdle was designing within the constraints of a Salesforce implementation. I had to rapidly acquaint myself with the possibilities and limitations inherent to Salesforce, ensuring my designs aligned with the platform's capabilities.

The company was built on the premise that it would transition customers onto the Salesforce platform if need be and support them customizing Salesforce using declarative tools and the Origination app to create workflows, processes and personalized experiences tailored to the needs of their origination teams.

Historically, this approach worked, and customers will always have the ability to do this. However, the lack of built-in features necessary for customers to get up and running has led directly to the issues the business was experiencing.

Sales have suffered due to the absence of expected features and the modern LOS experience. Churn is increasing because customers cannot fully leverage CL and require constant CL Salesforce administrative support to use it properly.
‍
Since the apps focus had always been on supporting back-office processes, it did not provide functionality specifically designed to support loan origination teams. Credit Analysts, Loan Officers, Loan Assistants and other personnel lack the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently. Consequently, it has become the customer's responsibility to build their own apps and customize layouts to deliver functionality not inherent to our system.

With the shift in priorities to focus more on the end-user experience, there was a collective need to understand more about what banking personal utilizes our platform to perform their jobs and what their needs were.

Through our existing customer resources, I conducted remote interviews of a variety of banking employees to learn more about what they do, their current tools and processes and any pain-points they experience during loan origination.

I had learned that many users were still utilizing dispirit systems to complete loan origination and there was a lack of transparency into bank defined workflows and responsibilities. Statuses were not being updated and tasks not being generated because actions were being taken outside of our product.

The goal was to reduce the amount and time and effort to implement Origination within an organization while providing features to support known processes to allows customers to quickly get up and running and to allow effecient customization and personalization to meet their needs.

I worked with our product and engineering teams to prioritize new features and enhancements to loan status, task management, internal collaboration and workflow improvements while providing visibility into bank-defined requirements for end-users.

Templatize workflows, processes and envionrments to help organaizations develop standards as quickly as possible. Providing best practices, guideance on utilizing origination features.

I also created a new design system and component library that aligned more with current UX best practices and usability standards all while taking into consideration brand and Q2 guidelines.

Even with a heavily automated loan qualification process to establish an applicant’s creditworthiness, people still need to be involved in loan application processing and funding. Visibility into the actions that need to be taken for each application would be one of the more impactful features we could deliver to end-users.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is a good example of this. lt's at the core of compliance and a mandatory process of identifying and verifying the client's identity when opening an account. Surprisingly, we did not have a workflow built into our product for processing KYC even though we had the integrations to do it.

I worked with our product and support teams to build standard workflows using events, rules, documents, integration providers, and actions. I then designed the required actions feature that surfaced user actions for each application.

KYC became a standardized origination workflow that populates the required actions list for each application. And the cool thing is, it directly links to the area the application where the action can be completed.

Users still have complete control over these workflows and can customize them to their liking, but what we had learned after launching this feature is that other than some minor tweaking, and little to no support needed from CL, it did the job.

Our commitment to modernizing our legacy product and introducing user-centric tools for loan processing led to a product that is more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable to use, ultimately resulting in higher overall quality and user satisfaction. As a result, we gained a stronger competitive advantage in the market, reduced development costs, and, most importantly, achieved higher user satisfaction levels.

While I'd like to take credit for the successes we achieved in establishing a dedicated UX team, it's undeniable that these accomplishments were the result of a collective effort across our entire organization. The collaborative effort produced tangible, positive impacts not only with our potential and existing customers but also in how our team functioned, fostering an active engagement in a user-centered, more agile approach to product development.These efforts ignited greater cross-functional collaboration, facilitating open communication among designers, developers, marketers, support, and other team members. It also successfully aligned our product development with broader business objectives, driving overall success and revenue growth.