menu About Work About Work Social Social Shiv Sandesh

Stellar The leading app for home repair contractors and software for maintenance

Introduction Stellar is a home maintenance/construction company that contracts home repair orders to the relevant contractors. In order to do business at scale, the company uses a variety of off-the-shelf software as well as some custom ones. However, the changing industry demands and subpar software have made it hard to grow the business. Contractor and resident dissatisfaction due to inconsistent experiences and delays.

Property manager frustration due to the problems with work order pricing.

Lack of control over off-the-shelf software leading to cascading issues with limited or no solutions.
Pain points and challenges

Stellar CRM, Scheduling and Pricing Enterprise AI Learn how Salesforce was defeated at their own game of CRM and job scheduling. explore Stellar Pro Mobile The best and highest rated contractor app for home repair and maintenance explore

NEXT arrow_forward Design thinking based research Design thinking workshops conducted across 3 tracks:


1. Contractor experience
2. Scheduler optimization Infrastructure
A total of 3 sessions with 150+ participants were conducted from Feb 2023 to Jan 2024 Insights were gathered to optimize every part of the software offerings from Stellar.
Field research was conducted with several contractors doing live work orders. This exposed things to fix, as well as confirming the workflow hypotheses.

Contractor Insights:
Photo workflows needed the most optimization for efficiency. Finance and pay information needs to be surfaced sooner. Need an easy way to handle historical work orders, see what has been done before and plan new work.

In order to address contractor requirements, I created several hypotheses for interaction and workflow. These were tested though several iterations of A/B testing, mid and high fidelity prototypes and several ride-alongs with contractors on real work orders.

Finally, I conducted an extensive 3 month user acceptance phase to launch the pilot and follow with much needed features: Pay information and finance management Work order updates Contractor skill management and tiers
Research Design thinking at scale arrow_back PREVIOUS
NEXT arrow_forward Because more than 50% of the work done in a work order happens in the office, optimizing the negotiation, pricing and scheduling process will greatly improve the efficiency leading to increased revenues. Human centered approaches Design thinking process In order to understand and establish the workflow for estimators, project managers and logistics experts (LEs) at Stellar, I led the team in conducting a series of activities to discover their needs:

In-office anthropological studies with transcription
Video recorded observation sessions on live work orders
Insight misc Scheduling deep dive arrow_back PREVIOUS
NEXT arrow_forward Enterprise CRM Due to the improvements made to the scheduling and invoice/quote generation, Stellar was able to make a generational leap in efficiency.

The inclusion of AI based UX and smart templating in the follow up release led to further improvements, resulting in overall savings of 55% and more than $500k in the first year
GRowth SCALing Defeating Salesforce at Scale arrow_back PREVIOUS
Process and Progress

Highlights Finance management for contractors: get paid sooner, grow business Manage crews and operate in multiple locations Real time work order management In-office and on-site efficiency and productivity Monthly and quarterly reports, full management dashboard Templates, Licensing and state /region specific rules built into the app for time savings

Results Invoicing Time / Costs Time to invoice - a key marker of productivity improved by more than 50%
Salesforce costs reduced by $500k
Automation Scheduling automation implemented and increased by 55% Revenue Key revenue goals on track for 2024 Contractor engagement metrics up by 35% due to the usage of the user centered design thinking approach. NPS Greatly increased client satisfaction: NPS scores up by more than 10 points.

Work order calendar 01 Earnings, reports and finances 02 Foolproof structured repairs 03 Handle multiple work orders in real time 04 95% Customer Satisfaction Rate 05 Multiple disciplines 06