Caring.com
is a senior living referral service, designed for caregivers seeking information and support as they care for aging loved ones. I was the Design Director from 2013-2016 and was part of the company as it pivoted from a subscription to an extremely successful lead-gen model which lead us to acquisition.
My Role:
I started at Caring.com as a Performance Marketing Designer. At this phase I was tasked with redesigning and rebuilding the conversion funnel to maximize inbound traffic. During the second act of my time at Caring.com I was the lead UX / UI Designer, designing and building back-end partner and consumer tools to optimize lead quality. The final phase of my time at Caring.com was spent as the Design Director where I paired with the Director of Product to define the product roadmap and was in charge of full-cycle product design and development all the way from story scope and definition to design, development, release, and iteration.
Over my time at Caring.com I was in charge of research, design, product development, and releases for several products and features:
Redesigned, developed, and monitored performance analytics of our SEM Program
Redesigned, rebuilt and tested our email marketing channel
Designed a CRM from scratch for our Support Agents
Designed a Portal for our partners to monitor their lead metrics
A website redesign employing Bootstrap and responsive design (semantic UI was new at the time)
Research & Persona Development
The majority of our customers were 50-60 years old and were seeking assisted living options for their parents. On average 10,000 baby boomers retire everyday. Designing our SEM flows to be easy to navigate with clear typography and images proved to be quite successful. Additionally, research revealed that this market was extremely price sensitive. Having a lot of information regarding the costs of assisted living helped fuel top of funnel metrics.
Some items I learned from surveying our users:
Designing for seniors will make your site accessible to pretty much everybody else. You are forced to implement good practices since older adults are particularly affected by poor usability standards.
They read every word on a page and frequently print out information. This meant that we needed a solid layout and colors on all our pages that would be printer friendly.
They want a human connection. Imagery or references to real people are especially effective in gaining their trust.
Phase 1 - Conversion Optimization
Assessing the landscape of lead referral services, Caring.com's target customers, and redesigning the conversion funnel to maximize inbound traffic.
SEM Overhaul
Our first variant hit it right out the gate.
Created relevance and unity by making adwords campaign and H1 "Assisted Living Costs"
We split the form into two steps, making the signup process less intimidating.
Implemented bold typography and a clear design
Added IP and location detection
Offered a glimpse of location data to guide the user into the value proposition
Phase 2 - Focusing on lead quality over quantity
Now that we were getting lots of inbound traffic, it was time to keep tabs on them. I built a tool to help our agents properly file leads into our proprietary (and archaic) crm.
Contact
Our current software, 5-9, was buggy and had frequent outages. It also did not link directly to our in-house CRM, talk. We wanted to add a Salesforce-like layer to expedite the Agent workflow.
Research
To kickstart this new tool, I interviewed call center agents and managers to surface topics such as:
What they disliked about 5-9
Usability
Painpoints
Wishlists for improvement
Wireframes
Throughout this phase I was working almost exclusively with the call center Agents and Managers, I wanted to keep the product managers and stakeholders out of the picture. We iterated through several wireframes to create the most useable solution.
High Fidelity Comps
Once the wireframes were situated, I moved onto card sorting and high fidelity comps. Here the product managers and I defined the scope of the epic and broke down the product into sprints.
This Epic contained two products:
The Agent UI
This is where the agent would make calls, set dispositions, and log customer information.
The Manager UI
This was a fully-featured dashbaord where the call center managers could monitor agents actions including:
Agent state - online, offline, on break
State duration - how long has the agent been on break or on a call
Queues - what channels agents were currently assigned to
Tactics - assign a method to the agent based on seniority, cold calling, follow up, etc
Skills - the ability to assign agents to specific traffic channels
Phase 3 - Partner nurturing and B2B Tools
Killer SEM program? Check. Happy customer service department? Check. Now it was time to give our partners some attention. Once our call center agents passed assisted living communities leads we had to rely on the client services team to follow up with them to track move-ins (revenue) and what community they moved into.
Product party for our partners
Our partners were sigificantly more tech-savvy than our base demographic. I interviewed several of our power providers (Brookdale & Atria for example) and some smaller mom and pop communities. The goal was to get them to report their move-ins so we could track our revenue.
Insights gained from interviewing our partners:
They are always connected and constantly on the phone
They often manage 2-3 communities
They are as hungry for data as we were
Several tools were created to solve this business requirement. Note that the section below has been scaled down quite a bit. Please contact me directly if you have any questions.
The Partner Portal
View leads complete with customer profiles, contact history, and contact information
The ability to update their rates which would update live on our providers page
The ability to report move-ins
The Move-in Reporting Tool
Report your move-ins
View your move-in rate
See how your move-in rate stacks up against other communities in your region
Lead Auction Tool
Set a maximum amount of leads you want to bid on
Set a maximum buget
Receive leads and view their contact information
See which communities you lost leads to
Final thoughts
Being a part of Caring.com was tremendously rewarding due to it’s beautiful social mission. Caring.com’s agile process was also extremely mature since our CTO was a board-member of scrum alliance. Every single decision we made was data-driven, every feature enhancement was a/b tested. A hallmark of my career.