How we rebuilt two entire hospitality platforms and gave timesharers more agency in their ownership.
The Ask
Design a unified and scalable timeshare ownership platform serving both timeshare owners and call-center customer service agents.
Synopsis
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.
Project Type (2)
Operational Platform
End-user account portal
Company
Wyndham Vacation Ownership
Industry
Hospitality
Platforms (2)
Native – SAAS
Web
Role
Director, Experience Design
Deconstruct to streamline
The fundamental task was to take stock of the maze of four legacy software platforms and complete set of operational functions available to call center agents, demolish all of it, and rebuild from the ground up as one operational platform.
What resulted was one of the most extensive functional architecture maps that the team would solution for across our next two years of work.
In total, we had to understand how each of Wyndham’s resort collections were managed, and how that management for both owners and WVO’s operations and services teams were handled via their technology stack. Ultimately, we audited 4 different legacy applications, some more than 15-years old, breaking each down to their specific functions, sorting all the mess and building a massive new information architecture to make sense of it all.
WYNDHAM PROPERTIES
Note, these properties were considered Wyndham’s primary resort networks, which dedicated operations systems. In total, WVO had more than 8 separate resort networks
Club Wyndham
150+ Destinations
Shell Vacations
25 Destinations
Margaritaville
8 Destinations
Worldmark
75 Destinations
MANAGING SOFTWARE PLATFORMS & PORTALS
While some data and software was shared across resort networks, these 4 major areas of operations were expected to be consolidated into our final product. Of particular note, the primary legacy portal their call center agents utilized service owners was well over 15 years old at the time and required line-text inputs to carry out any and all functions — imagine using an MS-DOS-like interface to do your banking.
Resort Management
Resort Directory
Reservations
Owner Database
Owner Profiles
Owner Currency (Points)
Owner Benefits
Concierge
Travel & Hospitality Partnerships (e.g. amusement park ticket reservations)
Cruise Reservations
Hotel Reservations
Airline Reservations
Car Rentals
Charitable Giving
Point Pooling
Contracts
Use-year dates
Financials
Loans / Fees
Payments
Ultimately, this extensive IA is what I produced coming out of our lengthy audit:
My Methodology
Inputs, exploration, outputs, results. Case studies tell the story of that journey. But, there’s a foundation for my creativity. Methodology, toolkits, motivations, focuses.
Two dedicated platforms for two user-types
Per our remit, Voyager called for two dedicated platforms that we were to design and build over the next two years:
Timeshare Owners
Our end user, the consumer
CUI
Call Center Agents
Our super-user, the customer service provider
TRIP
Platform
Web-based desktop portal
Responsive Web Intranet Portal (SAAS)
Core Use Cases
- Reservations
- Payment Portal
- Resort Search & Brochures
- Ownership Handbook & Wiki
- New Owner Startup Guide
- Customer Services & Services
- Account Management
- WVO News & Updates
- Reservations
- Contract Management
- Payments
- Owner Search & Intelligence
- Agent Intelligence
- Currency (points) management
- Membership Management
What we delivered
TRIP: Login Screen
Outcomes
+41,500
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
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
Blood and 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.