Product
I asked what information was actually required to begin a pre-application. Which fields were essential, and which could wait?
Newtek Business Services
Why did offering an existing customer another product take nearly an hour?
At Newtek Business Services, technical support representatives had an opportunity to introduce existing customers to other products in the company's portfolio.
The problem? Getting a complete picture of a customer meant navigating two separate systems, digging through information designed for different purposes, and then guiding interested customers through a lengthy pre-application form.
The entire process averaged nearly an hour.
I was brought back to Newtek as a UX/UI Designer and Front-End Developer. This was my first project.
And I had a few questions.
01 / Who?
Who actually needs what?
Before designing anything, I went to the people involved.
Business
I asked which products the company most wanted to promote. Not every product needed the same emphasis.
Support
I asked representatives to walk me through their current process. What did they need to know about the customer? Where were they spending time? What information was difficult to find?
Development
I worked with developers to understand what was technically possible. Could the systems communicate? Could product recommendations be dynamic? How could the experience be simplified without creating a maintenance headache?
Four different perspectives. One shared problem.
02 / What?
What was getting in the way?
Three things became clear.
Fragmented information.
Customer information lived in two systems. Representatives had to move between them to understand which products a customer already had.
Too much to sort through.
Much of the portfolio consisted of financial products with detailed information. Representatives needed a quick, relevant view—not every available detail.
Too many steps.
When a customer expressed interest in another product, the lengthy pre-application became another obstacle.
The problem wasn't a shortage of information.
It was getting the right information to the right person at the right time.
03 / Why?
Why make people work this hard?
This became the more interesting question.
- Why should a support representative need to understand two systems to have one customer conversation?
- Why show every product when only some are relevant to that customer?
- Why treat every potential upsell equally when the business has specific priorities?
- And why collect a full application’s worth of information when the customer is only expressing initial interest?
We didn't need to reinvent Newtek's product portfolio.
We needed a better way to connect the information, priorities, and people already there.
04 / What if?
What if we made the next step obvious?
I designed a simplified customer dashboard built around one idea:
Show representatives what they need to know—and what they can do next.
The experience brought together four key elements.
A clearer customer picture
A straightforward view of the products a customer already had.
Relevant opportunities
Products the customer didn't have were surfaced based on relationships with their existing products.
A reason to prioritize
Products that matched a customer's profile and were identified as business priorities received additional “suggested” styling.
Less friction when someone was interested
Selecting a product opened a modal with a streamlined pre-application containing only the essential fields.
We also created a small administrative interface for managing product relationships and selecting priority products, so those decisions weren't buried in the front-end experience.
I worked with the development team to translate the design into a working solution.
The outcome
From nearly an hour to under ten minutes.
From ~60 min
to <10 min
The redesigned process reduced average completion time from approximately one hour to just under ten minutes.
The solution made customer information easier to find, relevant product opportunities easier to identify, and the first step toward an additional product substantially faster.
The biggest improvement wasn't adding more information. It was questioning how much information anyone actually needed.