Humboldt Pest Control
Inspiring customer confidence through user experience.
Legacy Agency Design Project -> from 2018
Humboldt Pest Control
Background
Humboldt Pest Control originally approached my company in 2016 for a new website to replace their current website which was nearly a decade old. I was fortunate enough at the time to provide them with a distinctive visual design (as seen below). After initially providing them with a simple website, they approached us almost two years later seeking help driving traffic to their website.
At this point, I was put in charge of managing the long-term client relationship and designing innovative solutions for their business.
Discovering the real problem.
A disconnected Customer Experience.
While they were originally seeking to drive traffic to their website, what I discovered once I dived into conversations with the team at Humboldt Pest was that their website was just 1 component of a larger issue with their customer touch points that was creating a disconnected experience and losing them business. In essence, when someone began to interact with their business it felt like they were peppering with disconnected and disjointed channels with different designs. A holistic review and design of their customer experience was needed to really drive a change in the business.
“You can drive all the traffic to your website you want, but at the end of the day you need paying customer.”
What originally started out at a $500/month retainer was quickly increased to a $3,500 a month retainer. Our goal with the larger retainer was to transform their website into a digital core product experience for their business that not only drove traffic and inquiries but interacted and engaged with customers in a meaningful way to drive confidence.
The Execution Strategy
The initial retainer with Humboldt Pest I structured to look like this:
This quickly evolved to a significantly more comprehensive retainer which I structured to follow an iterative production cycle that allowed our team to make adjustments quickly, monitor the results, report, research, and then dive back into production for iterative changes.
My Design Solution.
Digital Foundation | Supportive Inquiry
Digital Foundation
The first area that I invested time in designing was their underlying content data structure so that their website could provide a more dynamic, visually beautiful, and information-rich contextual platform with deep-linking capabilities. I designed a pest content learning center that became the hinge for the contextual inquiry system. This pest learning center provided sectioned content delivery systems that were cross-pollinated with customers testimonial, business services, and special offers relevant to the particular pest.
This system ultimately provided a more dynamic user experience by providing contextually relevant information for a visitor to see as they now had access to comprehensive content about a pest which gave them insight into not only their own situation but how the company could help them.
The Results:
Average time spent on their website by a visitor by over 275%
Average pages per session increased by 321%
Return users increased by 145%
The next stage of the process was to construct a user experience surrounding the inquiry which would help build confidence in the prospective customers of Humboldt Pest that they had indeed reached the right people. What we knew going in is that only 27% of submissions converted into paid clients. Part of this equated to the time it took for a follow-up from a sales representative which would leave the visitor with anxiety during the period of time between submission and follow-up.
The solution that I designed to help resolve this was to transform the standard webform into a rich contact inquiry location and constructed a contextual confirmation page with an accompanying automated contextual confirmation email. All of these elements would tap into the digital foundation that we established.
The new experience allowed someone to select a pest that they were in need of help with as part of their inquiry. Once submitted they would be directed to a page that would provide “context” pulled from dedicated pest pages for the individual. Directly following this there would be an automated email sent out to the person which would include the same information that was housed on the confirmation page in case the individual jumped quickly from it.
The Results
Post-submission conversion increased to 56% - this represented a significant enough change in post-submission conversion that the company would go on to hire 3 new pest control servicemen within 2 new counties in 6 months - their fastest growth ever.
Supportive Inquiry
Systems Design
Customer Experience Lifecycle
Creating a seamless experience.
As noted, when I began to talk with Humboldt Pest and begin to understand the issues they faced I quickly realized that they were struggling not simply with a poor website, but an experience across their entire customer lifecycle that was disconnected.
One of the last major pushes that I made with the client was to transform their strengthened digital presence into a core experience for their clients. I pushed them in their direction for two key reasons:
The website offered a controlled carefully branded experience.
The website offered a means for tracking and validating the changes we were seeking to make.
Below is an illustration that I used when communicating the strategy to our client. What this ultimately shows is how the website can be used to populate with content key customer touch points and then become a key landing location and automated system for additional aspects of the customer lifecycle. This was designed to ultimately streamline the control of their presence not only online, but also with their clients through the entire process of their relationship.
One way that this manifested itself was as simple as the way that the Humboldt Pest provided quotes for inquiries related to a particular pest. Originally they would send out plan test emails which were stripped of the character that we had built up on the company’s website. Below is an example of the change that I made across their print media that tied directly in with their identity online.
Personal Reflections
Building Relationships
In an interesting turn of events when EvenVision first began conversations with Humboldt Pest they were ready to sign us up for a $2000 monthly retainer immediately. However, I recognized that part of that was owing to a past relationship with a vendor who burned them badly. Sensing an opportunity I requested that we keep our initial retainer to a fraction of their budget and created a trial period to build a relationship focused on open and honest communication. While my boss initially frowned upon this, it ultimately proved to be a huge success for our team, as well as for our client as it gave us time to work out kinks in our system to provide better support.
Iterating Strategies
Because of the nature of our monthly retainer I knew that we had an opportunity to develop a strategy for iterative design and development. This allowed us to move away from the traditional waterfall approach that many of our projects fell into and gave my team an opportunity to quick build and scrape things that didn’t work.
This project would ultimately lead a more formalized development of our Ongoing Monthly retainer strategy for various other clients that I managed as well as other clients within the agency.
Designing a System
It’s easy to get lost in the pixels. At first our contact at Humboldt Pest was seeking to manage more of the execution. But once I presented the opportunity to building out the system that supported the actual pixels they began to realize that the true value of design lay not in the visual presentation but the way that the visual presentation can help guide and inform a user experience and ultimately provide a customer experience across their entire lifecycle unmatched by any of their competitors.