Guided Configuration

A bit of background

• At Plansource, our main product is a benefit administration Platform called Benadmin.
• We help HR admins in our client companies to choose the benefits they want to offer to the employees every year. These are called renewals.
• Usually this is a time consuming process. HR admins need to fill in long pages of forms manually.
• For new clients our support team handles this for initial year.These are called implementations.
• Since both processes were using same code base they were accomplished using the same configuration section of our product previously.
• When Alight one of our key rivals decided to shutdown, one of their products targeting clients with -1000 lives, we were able to get a subcontract from them that allowed us to move the clients over to our system.
• This meant we should do implemntation for these clients in a short span of 6 months. Usually it would take months to complete implementation for each clients.
• When we analyzed how this opportunity could be leveraged we found the key bottleneck was the efficiency of the implementation process.
• So leadership paused all the other development work and decided to resource almost 80% of the entire development team to work on this in the upcoming quarter.
• So in a way we had to redesign our legacy configuration system in the short span of 1 month targeting the implementation side first (So that Implementation could be done in time) and later the renewal side as well.

What we tried to solve

• Our initial target was to streamline implementations.
• Typically, our in house support teams took months to complete implementation for a client. We had to speed this up somehow.
• Secondly we wanted to retain these clients past the short sub contract period.
• For this we had to rework our renewal process and make it easier and intuitive for them to do the annual renewals.

Who we designed this for

The main targeted users are HR admins in our client companies. Secondary personas would be our limited in house support team who helps in renewal for some high stake clients.

How we designed this

User Research

• We started by trying to understand how our current renewal and implementation processes were to figure out how we could improve them.
• We connected with our internal support teams arranging a focus group sessionand tried to map their current workflows in implementation.
• One key insight was that most of the time when they do implementation the client already might have some form of configuration files / reports generated from the platform they used in the previous year.
• Since we should also consider Renewals, we also connected with a few client HR's to understand how they used to do the renewals, Key bottlenecks they faced and their insights on improving the process
• What we learned is employers generally prefered to retain their previous years configurations if possible 70% of the time

Verification

• To validate our insights we decided to leverage our databases
• We employed help from our internal support team and researched how often users tried to retain the same configurations year after year.
• The results were aligning with what we learned via interviews

Ideation

• Our solution was supposed to simplify Implementations as well as Renewals
• To simplify Implementation, our most viable solution was to introduce an import functionality.
• Support team can collect their previous configuration files from clients. We would leverage A.I. to fetch information from the diversely formated files like these and autopoulate most of the data for support teams.
• Other ideas we explored are considering integrations with other similar platforms,Using templates,Automating configurations with AI etc.
• But when we had to consider renewals as well the import functionality made more sense and feasible.
• In case of renewals previous years configurations would be auto configured and whenever there is a mismatch due to situations like, benefit vendors changing plans/benefits etc. user would be mandated to review and choose different inputs.

Initial Validation

• Since time was critical we decided before delving deeper into the solution we derived it is good to validate it.
• We shared our approach in a focus group of internal support team and Client HR's.
• The concept was well received and we decided to go forward with the solution.

Structuring the flow

• Next we revisited the entire configuration flow.
• We checked if there were any sections of configurations which are redundant/outdated and could be hence removed.
• Next via card sorting by the focus group,we classified the sections into three - those that could be auto filled, Those that could be auto filled but requires mandatory user inspection and those that could not be filled from previous data.
li> We also did a card sorting to understand how sections could be grouped, what is the usual order they fill data etc.
• Accordingly user flows were created

Design Prototype Testing

• Due to time constraints we skipped wireframing and decided to directly get into prototyping.
• Using the user flows we created the prototypes for each section.
• Since implementation teams had to pick stuff up soon we divided the entire work into different sections and created separate prototypes for each.
• After each section was prototyped they were validated by usability testing with users and changes were made and passed on to dev team for implementation.
• Often while implementation was happening for one section we were working on design for an upcoming section. This put us under tight pressure. But we were able to manage it and successfully complete the project.

Reception

• After the entire tool was implemented we did check with the support teams for the feedback.
• The response we received was overwhelmingly positive.
• For the work we did in that short time frame it was really rewarding.