Reducing private practice onboarding time by 320x
Wellfit • 2022
Wellfit is a Dallas-based technology partner combining technology, healthcare, and financial services to dental care providers with advanced technology tools including a financing marketplace, payment portal, and membership and discount dental plans.
Challenge
Client onboarding was manual and time-consuming onboarding process for their dental finance services, which often took weeks or even months to complete due to repetitive data entry of basic information.
Impact
I lead the design of the new digital experience reducing onboarding time from 2 weeks to 45 minutes. We also delivered a robust design language and laid the foundation for the redesign of their core digital products.
My role
Responsible for discovery, workshops, project planning, design direction, and applied design
The team
1 design lead, 1 Senior designer, 1 design intern, 6 software engineers, 2 product managers
Timeline
July 2022 - January 2023
Growing pains
At the time, the 900+ dental practices using Wellfit’s digital products were acquired through their partnership with one Dental Services Organization (DSO). Strategically, Wellfit sought to capture a larger market share by providing their products to private practices however, they didn't have systems in place to scale.
How might we define an ideal onboarding journey for new DSOs and private practices?
B R E A K D O W N O F T H E P R O B L E M
Long, manual onboarding process
Onboarding required multiple resources taking at least 10 days to process for new dental practices. This was inefficient and not a scalable process with 4 employees.
User knowledge gap
The business was unfamiliar with the small, private dental practices, their pain points, and needs in order to design an effective experience.
S O L U T I O N
Self-service onboarding experience
Wellfit’s new onboarding portal allows for the setup to occur at practice level or with the assistance of the Wellfit Onboarding Specialists.
02
Easy client or practice setup
Onboarding specialists aggregate consequential information about each client. In the client view, they can validate the information entered early in the onboarding process.
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Progress tracking with the dashboard
The dashboard enables new practices or the Wellfit specialists view the status of the organization and practice set up and displays the progress of their selected product configuration.
03
Manual and multi-practice upload options
Importing practices to enroll into the Wellfit products can occur in bulk upload or manually for a small number of practices.
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Plan-specific onboarding
Tailored onboarding for each financial product, complete with specific steps and estimated time to complete the tasks.
D I S C O V E R Y
Understanding the landscape
The team facilitated 15 user interviews and defined archetypes highlighting the commonalities between our core groups.
We used Dovetail to organize our research. We became a bit overwhelmed with it’s abilities and over synthesized our results. Ultimately we used this data to begin understanding their goals, concerns, and vision for the business and the project.
G O A L S
Validate our understanding of the business goals and what constitutes as success around this product.
Empathize with users’ roles, needs, behaviors, and their jobs-to-be-done related to onboarding
Day 2 of our in-person workshops turned our attention from current to future state. We laid the foundation for the future state using a service blueprint. This artifact is ideal to assist in capturing the customer actions and the system events that occur simultaneously in the background for a 360 degree view of the experience we aimed to create.
As we conducted additional interviews with Wellfit proxies and users, we recognized a number of common themes between the identified personas. We developed this dual persona artifact to highlight their commonalities and their core differences between the DSO Decision Maker and the Private Practice Manager.
During a two-day in-person workshop, we took the insights gained throughout discovery phase to document the current onboarding journey, touchpoints, and customer sentiment. This established a shared mental model for the team and an alignment of the current state journey and all components involved.
Who was the competition?
For a deeper understanding of Wellfit’s unique market position, we conducted a competitive analysis of direct and indirect competitors.
Insights that influenced our onboarding design
Solidified need for ‘visible’ support
Highlight flexibility Wellfit offers throughout onboarding experience
Structuring the onboarding portal
We quickly realized how complex the info collection and configuration steps of the journey might become for a user onboarding to the Wellfit suite of products. The team quickly spun up a schematic to visualize the potential flow through the experience, ask our Wellfit partners clarifying questions, and further align as partners on the vision for onboarding.
Design principles
As a team we worked to define 4 core Design principles to guide our design choices.
P R O C E S S
Generating ideas
The team held an ideation session. We reviewed competitive data, onboarding best practices, and behavioral science themes before initiating a crazy 8’s exercise. The team walked through their sketches, sharing their top three and voted on the top ideas.
P R O C E S S
Designing the details
The complexity of the portal required design to get innovative when thinking about the organization of data required to set up practices, the org, and configuration of each product. The team initiated design concepts to inspire creativity and spark a visual direction.
Design for Speed
Because design and engineering were slated to begin simultaneously, the design resources identified the need to initiate some early design activities.
Setting up the style guide would allow engineering to set up components in their environment early allowing speed to productivity as designs were made available to build.
Outcomes
Enabled expansion of new customers
The new onboarding experience has enabled the Client to achieve their near term growth goals of increasing their customer base through a seamless onboarding process.
Full self-service onboarding
The solution enabled customers to fully onboard in a self service model if they desired. These changes led to increased operational efficiently by reducing manual tasks and staff allocation to onboarding activities.
Higher conversion rates
The improved onboarding process is expected to result in a higher percentage of new customers successfully completing the onboarding process and increased conversion rates.
2 weeks saved on onboarding
The new onboarding flow consolidated the onboarding of three products into a single one and effectively reduced time to value from weeks to minutes.