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Wyndham Voyager

The ask

Design a unified and scalable timeshare ownership platform serving both timeshare owners and call-center customer service agents

Wyndham Vacation Ownership (WVO), now known as Travel + Leisure Co, is the largest timeshare company on the planet with more than 245 resorts worldwide.

Operating since 1990, WVO had acquired many timeshare companies in pursuit of its rich destination portfolio. As a result, they also had complex suite operational platforms making it incredibly frustrating for timeshare owners and even customer service agents (serving owners remotely) to book a stay at a resort.

In 2015, Rokkan was approached to completely unify their technology ecosystem supporting the owner experience. This coincided and supported sweeping changes to their overall vacation ownership program: transforming from a rigid one-week, one resort experience to a points based, access to all resorts, anytime experience. Our remit was to build a two-platform experience, 1) facilitating call-center agent operations with a SAAS (service as a software) application named TRIP, and, 2) a web-based owner portal, named Customer User Interface (CUI).

Our work with Wyndham reflected a wonderful 4+ year relationship, expanding far beyond our initial remit.

Deliveries

  • Digital ecosystem for multiple use cases
  • Information Architecture
  • Operational Plaform (SAAS)
  • Responsive web site
Client

Wyndham Vacation Ownership

Area

Information Architecture & UX Design

My Role

Experience Design Director

Date

2015 – 2020

Deconstruct to reconstruct

My first and most fundamental task was to catalog the four legacy apps (two which used an MS-DOS-like command-line interface, that’s how old they were!).

I accounted for a complete set of operational functions available to call center agents through those apps, then took it all a part, bit-by-bit. I then had to re-architecture it all, from the ground up as one operational platform.

I then built an understanding of how each of Wyndham’s resort collections were managed, and, how management for both vacation owners (consumers) and WVO’s operations and services teams were handled via this technology stack.

The great challenge here was that timeshare companies that had been merged into WVO had their own unique sets of functions incorporated into these apps, which made for an incredibly disorganized function set.

After a good 3 weeks of scavenger hunting, sorting, confirming with clients and then re-sorting, what resulted was one of the most extensive functional and architecture maps that the team would use as a base for to solution against for next two years of work.

Wyndham Voyager TRIP Information Architecture

Presenting the unified architecture required 4 hours to walk through, verify with the client team and achieve sign off. One of my proudest moments was Sandy, our executive stakeholder, just sitting in awe of the work.

“I don’t even know how you even attempted this and succeeded! I’m nearly in tears. We’ve tried for years to do what you’ve done in the span of weeks.”

Sandy H., VP Customer Service and WVO Team Lead

Two platforms for two use cases

Per our remit, Project Voyager called for two dedicated platforms that we were to design and build over the next two years:

Consumers

CUI

Timeshare Owners
Our end user, the consumer

Agents

TRIP

Call Center Agents
Our super-user, the customer service provider

Platforms

Responsive web desktop portal

SAAS intranet for workstations

Core Use Cases
  • Reservations
  • Resort Search & Brochures
  • Ownership Handbook & Wiki
  • New Owner Startup Guide
  • Customer Concierge
  • Payment Portal
  • Account Management
  • WVO News & Updates
  • Reservations
  • Contract Management
  • Payments
  • Owner Search & Intelligence
  • Agent Intelligence
  • Currency (points) management
  • Membership Management
  • Keystroke UI

What we delivered

Outcomes

  • +41,500

    Bookings

    Incremental bookings over the first 6 months of CUI’s launch with a 10% net increase in usage within 30 days of go-live.

  • -1 week

    Training Time

    Reduction in training for customer service agents, from 5 to 4 weeks with a 10% reduction in call-handle times for newly hires and trained agents.

Director’s Notes

  • Sweat in sunny Orlando

    During the tenure of the CUI/TRIP project, and in-service of a hybrid agile-waterfall hybrid process, my team traveled to Orlando up to two (sometimes three) times per month. Together with clients, we solutioned side-by-side during two day workshops at WVO HQ where we’d come prepared to present both UX and Creative for that sprint.

    Day 1 of our workshops were our UX days, presenting wireframes designed over the course of the prior two weeks. We’d engage in a full-day workshop, interrogating the work with a room packed with 15-20 people (5 consisting of myself and the Rokkan team) with representation across WVO’s business groups: marketing, operations, IT/dev, customer service, et al. At the close of the day 1, we’d have stacks of notes for feedback to bring back to our hotel to prepare for day 2.

    Evenings on Day 1 could be grueling, UX and UI team members would collaborate to incorporate feedback for our creative presentations bright and early the next morning. Our Creative Director, Brian Barenio, on various trips could easily be up into the wee hours completing and polishing our finished work for presentation on Day 2.

  • Growing the account

    TRIP and CUI were a multi-year endeavor for Rokkan and Wyndham, completing the design phase required almost 20 sprints! And yet, that was only the opener for the Rokkan team as the account grew well beyond the scope of Voyager. Across the next few years, we conducted several rounds of user testing and optimization; defined a content strategy for them; business for Rokkan x Wyndham grew beyond experience and platform work as well as the agency began to take on media accounts.