Citima SaaS Application

Role : Lead designer / Branding / CEO

Context

In 2018, I co-founded the proptech startup Citima with Pierrick Thébault. Back then, we were both looking for a new place to stay: I was interested in buying an apartment and Pierrick in renting one.

We went on property-listing platforms such as Se Loger, Bien Ici, Le Bon Coin and sent a lot of requests. However, real agencies rarely got in touch with us, or after a long time.

We asked ourselves: why is the customer experience so bad ? That is how we started our investigation.

Report

We started designing Citima with this metric in mind: 80% of real estate projects start on the Web.

However, 85% of real estate agencies and property managers that we questioned declared that they were not properly equipped to deal with continuous flow of inquiries. Real estate agencies, property managers and independent agents were mostly using their mailbox and phone, which limited their productivity.

Result: long response time while individuals are used to instantaneousness, many untapped contacts, repetitive tasks with no added value.

Design process

1/ Discovery

- Documented study of the jobs of real estate agent and director of real estate agency

- On-site observations in a real estate agency

- Study of solutions leveraged by users

- 1:1 interview with agency managers, salespeople and individuals looking for accommodation.

- Surveys published on social networks targeting agency directors

2/ Analysis

- User journey map

- Personas

3/ Ideation

- Definition of observed pain points

- Reflection on the solutions to be provided

- Translation into functionalities and prioritization

4/ Prototyping

- User flow

- Wireframes

4/ Design

- Creation of the brand identity

- Creation of the design system

- UI design

Product

The design process gave birth to Citima, a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) SaaS (Software as a service) solution accessible from their web browser.

Citima captures all inquiries incoming from property-listing platforms, extracts data and dispatches it in its user interface.

It automates the processing and facilitates the management of leads, by sending a short questionnaire to each lead by email and text message.

Features offered:

Reception of all contacts from property-listing platforms and automatic generation of contact sheets.
Automated responses to contacts in less than 10 seconds by email and text.
Collection of key information from the real estate projects of tenants and buyer contacts through a questionnaire.
Automated qualification of real estate projects (Budget consistency / Research maturity / Research consistency) to help real estate agents and agents focus their efforts on the right contact and at the right time. (Development in progress)
Collection of secure rental records.
Integrated messaging.
Collaborative agenda with management of customer appointments
Tasks and reminders module
Lead tracking tool.
Reporting for agency directors.