Digital Innovation Lab at RXR

Intro: RXR is the third largest real estate owner, investor, and developer in the tri-state area. The Digital Lab at RXR strives to provide high-quality mobile and web apps to supplement our tenants’ experiences and ultimately lead to lease renewals.

The Challenge

There are three components RXR has added to the residential tenant experience that differentiate us from other properties: the resident mobile app, the staff-facing web app, and an RXO (residential experience officer). The resident mobile app allows our residents to book amenities, check for deliveries, register guests, book maintenance requests, chat with the concierge, and more. The staff-facing web app complements the resident app, and allows our staff --which includes concierges, property managers, RXOs, and maintenance teams-- to book and manage building services, and respond to the resident. The RXO is an on-site customer service agent, who has relationships with our residents, and often acts as the liaison between the resident and property staff. My goal is to create a seamless experience for the resident as well as a synchronous and data-backed engine to the staff, by leveraging these three components.

reaching feature parity

The first order of business was to refresh the look of the mobile and web app while reaching feature parity. McKinsey had created the initial design system and framework for the app, and my task was to update each page to match our brand identity and best design practices. Our competitors offer basic bookable services like cleanings and maintenance work orders, package delivery management, events, etc. We needed to exceed the quality of those features and user experience in our app.

Homepage feed

Guest authorization

Package deliveries

amenity reservations

Design system improvements

McKinsey's design system covered the basic color theme and components, but as we built upon their designs, we needed to update it to include our new components and styles.

Resident app Design system

staff-facing web app Design system

feature differentiation

Once we reached feature parity, we could work on new and exciting features for our residents and staff that go beyond what our competitors offer. Some examples of this are our RXO Assistant page, which surfaces insights into the resident lifecycle and trigger task notifications for our staff at the right time. This simultaneously saves our staff precious time in manually searching for the right time to reach out about lease renewals for example, and boosts the tenant relationship with the building as they receive surprise and delights when something goes wrong. We also built out a Know Your Resident global widget that lives on top of the staff app and allows any staff member to view a timeline of all the resident's interactions with the building as well as their resident profile, and immediately provide color when assisting the resident with their issue.

Know Your Resident Widget

RXO Assistant

data integration

We started collecting information on our resident interactions, and what a successful one looks like. We aim to use this data to measure resident satisfaction, resident engagement, and inform the staff of new opportunities to provide an elevated experience. We are building out the engine to calculate these scores, and it will give a snapshot to our stakeholders and staff on how the building is faring. Scores are compared to a baseline, and fluctuations are noted. This data can also be fed into our RXO Assistant engine to supply tailored recommendations based on a resident's satisfaction and lease renewal probability.

We are beginning to ideate on other areas where this data feedback on our residents can be helpful. One stream is to leverage our knowledge any time there is a problem (e.g. maintenance delay, low NLP sentiment recorded in the chat conversation), to prompt our chatbot to follow up with the resident and make sure everything was taken care of. The idea is to follow up on the resident at important touch points in their lifecycle so they get a high-level concierge experience. There are many areas like this where we can elevate the resident and staff experience in an automated way.

Conclusion

It was an amazing experience to ideate on creative new features that would benefit our residents and staff, especially as our residential portfolio grew to new markets. It was very fulfilling to interview staff members and identify areas for improvement during initial requirement gathering and validation testing. I loved solving problems for them as well as our resident requests. Working on a lean team of three was challenging as we had less resources and often had to split features into future versions, but I learned a lot about flexibility and teamwork, and I ultimately wouldn't have it any other way.