Summary

• Sole designer working with a PM and 4 engineers

• A centralized self-service workflow to replace multiple spreadsheets and fully remove manual touch points with our engineering and finance teams.

• The workflow empowers agency owners to scale their business and brings visibility, flexibility, and clarity to pricing.

• The new workflow collects data on client rates to enable Honor to innovate on pricing models and automations in the future.

• In its first cycle, 42 owners used the tool and gave overwhelmingly positive feedback. This update saves weeks of the Honor’s team’s time.

The current rate change process is incredibly manual and leads to a high probability for error, creating a poor experience for all parties.

• The finance team is building BRTs, auditing submissions, and pulling additional one-off information for owners.

• Owners submit typos and errors and overlook critical steps, requiring several back-and-forth reviews with the Honor team.

• A client rate edit gets passed between at least 4 people and is manually entered into 3 different spreadsheets before it is saved into the system.

• Inaccurate rate communications are often sent to clients from Honor.
  

“I’ve been through 10 [rate change] cycles and 100% of the time there are errors…it’s shocking that a tech company can’t get this right.” — Agency owner

The BRT is overstuffed with irrelevant information and missing the client context owners need to make decisions.

Every rate for every client is displayed even if isn’t applicable, requiring constant scrolling to compare across columns. For example, you’ll see pricing for overnight visits even if a certain client only has day-time care. Some information is presented in a binary format due to the bulk data import, and it’s cumbersome to scan columns for yes or no answers.

On the other hand, owners consider much more than what is presented in the sheet. They often dig into a client’s care history to see if there have been any service issues, or they may rely on information they’ve gathered in interacting with clients and their families, like personal or financial struggles, when deciding if they might raise rates.

Additionally, the current process leaves owners feeling less control over their business. With Honor, owners can only adjust twice a year, in tandem with service rate changes. They feel pressured to make changes to keep their business afloat and feel like they’re nickel-and-diming their clients and hurting families who are already going through a stressful time. Owners are already feeling uneasy about other aspects of the platform and may decide to leave Honor all together if this does not change.

Goals and metrics

If we can provide owners a way to view and edit client rates outside of the current twice a year schedule, owners will have the visibility and flexibility to adjust to market conditions or client needs and to accelerate the growth of their business, and in turn, Honor’s business.

Success metrics

• Offline workflows should go to zero (no more spreadsheets)

• Errors in each pricing cycle (client-facing and owner-facing) should go to zero

• Honor team time (finance, eng, and support teams) spent per cycle on rate changes & comms should be close to zero
  
  

Business goals

• Grow the franchise network

• Drive Care Platform conversions

• Improve Care Platform economics

Solution

We see a future where owners are spending more time in the community, talking to current and potential clients and doing more of what brought them to this business in the first place. In the future, the system suggests when it might be time to raise rates based on a client’s care situation, the overall book of business, and the current market conditions, and Honor’s financial infrastructure is flexible enough to not be tied to semi-annual service rate changes.

As a team we went through multiple rounds of sketches and feedback among our internal stakeholders, as well as concept testing with owners, to narrow in on what our first step towards this future could look like.

Concept pivots:

• Recommendations were shelved for now because they could take away a sense of ownership and control and would be more beneficial when we have more structured data

• “Easy buttons” to maintain profit across the book or by client feel too numbers-driven

Owners can edit rates using a guided flow within their existing owner portal.

• Owners are no longer tied to the twice a year BRT process. They can edit rates for an individual client or several throughout the year and without having to interface with the Honor team.

• Client context and financial history that owners previously stored in their heads or required a follow-up call to Honor are now woven into the respective steps or can be accessed more easily within the same portal.

• The guided flow matches the owner’s mental model in deciding which clients are ready for a rate change, and it acts as a sandbox for owners to view in real-time how certain changes affect business projections overall as well as on an individual level, similar to what is seen in the BRT. Internally, we can start to gather how client filters may relate to rate increases and understand the reasons behind the change.

• Error prevention is built into the tool and doesn’t require the Honor team to audit. Owners are given visual cues to ensure this change is enacting what they intended, e.g. by not raising rates for this particular client, I can see an indicator that the margin will decrease, and I’m okay with that.

• Client rate communications are shifted back to owners in this flow and ensures accuracy and a return to a more personal touch between owners and their clients.

Owners have more day-to-day visibility into client pricing in the Owner Portal.

In a net new client tab, owners now can view the financial details of a client in depth to determine if and when they might raise rates for an individual or to answer a client’s billing questions.

Previously, owners could see a list of clients and their individual revenues in the portal, but charge rates, service rates, and edit history per client were not readily available outside of the BRT.

Results and next steps

MVP implementation began in May 2023 and was still in progress when I left the company. I worked with our engineers to adapt the designs to current technical constraints, set the foundation for future iterations, and prioritize building key aspects of the flow to get feedback from the full group of owners.

Out of 50 agencies with planned rate changes, 42 agencies used the tool in this MVP release. Only 11 reached out to our finance team for support, mostly to “make sure I’m doing this right the first time”, and this is a major improvement compared to previous cycles that were 100% handheld by the finance team. Only 1 agency had any issue that required engineering involvement.

Owners gave overwhelmingly positive feedback about the tool, with the main talking point being “it’s easy to use”.

“I submitted my changes today. It appears that it worked smoothly! Thanks for the resources that were simple to understand and use!”

There was minor usability feedback, generally around feature enhancements we’d already considered and traded off due to scope but were planned for future phases.