Rewards program
The problem statement
Prior to 2022, the company partnered with several different vendors to provide their members with motivational rewards platforms. The goal of this project was to create an in-house rewards program that drives health plan engagement and enables fitness goals into one seamless digital experience for the member, while reducing operational expenses by decommissioning legacy platforms and partnerships. With this direction, stakeholders hoped to see better digital engagement, improve our member NPS, and even retain new business as this, at the time, was a market differentiator among our competitors.
Additionally, the product stakeholders we’re extremely frustrated with their experience prior to my team joining the project, which required a skillful navigation and stakeholder management.
The Approach & Process
I received this project mid-design cycle, as the company was transitioning away from a consulting agency and bringing the design resourcing in-house. Additionally, the product organization had just launched a new design, which had not been implemented in the current design set for the rewards program. Finally, the organization wanted to expand the feature’s requirements to include a partnership with Apple, which would allow members to use their earned rewards to offset the cost of an Apple Watch. Thus my approach was to:
Hosting sessions with the offboarding consulting designers to understand what they had completed and the intention of their designs.
Working with product stakeholders to deeply understand the requirements, timeline, expectations, and frustrations, while assuring them of the project’s future success.
Accurately sizing and scheduling the work to deploying a team of designers to tackle different features.
Creating artifacts that help the stakeholders visually understand the design process.
Creating design templates leveraging the new design system, so that new rewardable activities and redemption options could be easily implemented once discovery had been completed.
The Experience
The outcome
Even though the rewards experience is only available to a subset of our total population, it has become our most “sticky” experience by far through repetitive engagement and a variety of redemption options. Some key stats:
#1 purpose of visit for the application, driving 30-40% of all traffic week-over-week.
Consistent NPS of 20+
Consistent task completion of 70+%
Additionally, our templates and artifacts were used to stand up a center of excellence and extended to all lines of business who were implementing the rewards program.
And finally, the relationship between product and engineering stakeholders was completely shifted to a more harmonious nature, allowing my team to work more at the forefront of the product lifecycle, helping with more generative research and ideation for new features.
