Product Designer & Creative Strategist



Optimising customer experience and team efficiency with an omnichannel tool


LendInvest |  London, UK | February, 2023



LendInvest is a specialised mortgage lender whose products are only available via intermediaries – brokers, networks and mortgage clubs.

In theory, brokers should have been able to find everything they needed on the website and in the online portal. In practice, they weren’t. The portal felt clunky and unintuitive; the information architecture didn’t align with how brokers actually think; and journeys that should have been quick felt slow and slightly confusing.

So what did they do? They picked up the phone.







Calls to the sales desk kept climbing, and a big chunk of that volume was made up of very similar, very basic queries. The sales team was turning into a help desk, leaving less time to focus on commercial conversations and new business. As LendInvest grew, this model clearly wouldn’t scale—unless they simply hired more people, which wasn’t a sustainable answer.

Everyone was frustrated: brokers, sales, and the operations team were trying to keep the wheels turning.




My goal was to create a scalable, unified support experience that helps mortgage brokers find answers quickly—reducing friction —by using the existing Salesforce Service Cloud infrastructure





LendInvest already had a fully capable CRM—Salesforce Service Cloud. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we asked

How can we use the tools we already have to reduce friction for brokers and ease the load on our internal teams?

Our aims were clear:
  • Enable brokers to self-serve more effectively
  • Make support accessible at the right moment
  • Build a consistent experience across content, chat and human handoff
  • Reduce dependency on the sales desk for basic information

Intermediaries’ journey before Omnichannel rollout




Research & Insights

To understand why brokers were resorting to phone calls, we analysed:
  • On-site search behaviour
  • Drop-off points across the portal
  • Common call themes coming into the sales desk
  • The language brokers used to describe products

A pattern emerged: support wasn’t visible when needed. Information existed—but not in the way brokers expected to find it.

This informed a core design principle:

Support should feel like part of the journey, not a separate destination.







Design Approach

Working closely with engineering, I redesigned the experience around three pillars:
  1. Self-serve first: Make helpful content structured, searchable and easy to access from high-intent pages.
  2. Seamless escalation: Allow brokers to move from content to chat to human support without repeating themselves.
  3. Consistency across channels: Whether a broker reads an article, opens the chat, or speaks to a rep, the experience should feel continuous.






The Solution

We built an omnichannel support system integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud, designed to scale without increasing headcount.

Key Features

1. Smart, searchable help centre

  • Reorganised around brokers’ mental models rather than internal terminology
  • Contextual surfacing of relevant articles throughout the website

2. Chat widget connected to the CRM

  • Travels with the user across the site
  • Passes context (page, product, previous searches) directly into Salesforce

3. Clear entry points across key journeys

  • Product pages, the portal and friction points now offer obvious support pathways

4. Smooth handoff to human support

  • Brokers never have to re-explain their query
  • Support reps see the full journey inside Salesforce










    © Cézar Almeida, 2025London, UK