Launching an experience with empathy to empower

It’s always scary launching an MVP no matter how big or small you think it may be, especially for a healthcare service that can impact people’s lives in such a significant way.

Next to this very humbling thought, your biggest hope is that all that time and effort invested in research, design and development by the entire team wasn’t a fail (even though you can learn from failure too).That the positive impact your hoping to make for the customer, will actually make a difference.

And although you already have so many ideas for making it better, you still want the MVP to confirm your research & hypothesis.

One of Eugene’s biggest products is Carrier Screening, an at-home genetic test that allows couples, individuals and donors to know the risk of passing on genetic variations to their future children. The results have the ability to significantly impact our customers lives.

For the last 3 months, the small but oh so passionate product team at Eugene have been working towards launching a self-service onboarding tool (and cross-platform across Desktop, iPhone and iPad) to help streamline the process of our services for both our customers and our clinicians.

Providing an empathetic and human service is at the core of what we do, and by empowering our customers to be in control of their own world, the launch of a new onboarding tool also allows our clinicians to help better support and be available for our customers in a present and more compassionate way.

Our intention wasn’t to reduce our service with our customers, in-fact the opposite. Our hypothesis was that by reducing the amount of pre-test consults required for every customer, it would allow us to increase the quality of care, time and attention we spend on the customers that need it the most.

Before this new process, customers that purchased our carrier screening kits were required to book a mandatory online 30 minute pre-test consult with a genetic counsellor, before their test was approved and sent to the lab. It also wasn’t until this session that they could provide consent to have the test processed — this is pretty crucial. This had the potential to delay the process of getting kits sent to the lab for final results and could be a major blocker for both our customers and operations.

Most of all though, our customers are the centre of this change. From our customers point of view, there are 3 different scenarios they fall in to daily.

Many customers feel really re-assured by speaking to a clinician early on, to ensure their concerns and questions are answered directly to their own experience, and to help them decide whether or not screening is right for them.

However more often than not, most are referred by their doctor, or completed self research, so they feel they have enough understanding of carrier screening and the confidence in the process that they don’t need a pre-test consult, this is just “one more meeting” (in the current world of endless zoom meetings) they don’t have the time, or see the need for.

For some, sharing personal history can be a very vulnerable moment even with healthcare professionals, so allowing our customers that so choose, to share what they felt as deeply personal in their own time and without pressure face-to-face, could help reduce the anxiety of their current journey.

This is where the idea for our MVP comes in. Our new onboarding system empowers our customers to make an informed choice about what level of care they want, not necessarily what a clinician thinks they need. The decision is their’s. It also allows them to complete their “homework” within minutes of purchasing our kits, this means providing their family history that helps us make sense of results, and consent (along with their partners who complete their own consent and history) without having to wait for a consult.

Have you completed all our onboarding tasks we ask, got all the information you need? Great, let’s get your kits ready and sent to our lab.

Not sure about something and want to chat to a clinician? Absolutely, we can do that too. We have a clinician available to chat when it’s most convenient for you.

In just 3 weeks since we released this new onboarding flow, pre-test’s have reduced by 56%, while retaining an NPS of 80+. Bottle necks such as chasing family history details and consent has reduced dramatically too.

Feedback has been reassuring we are on the right track, and our clinicians are starting to feel the positive impact both professionally and personally. We still provide pre-test consults for those that want or need them, our clinicians review every submission to ensure those with complex family history do not fly under the radar. So although there is increased automation with the new onboarding, it is still regulated and reviewed by our team.

Now I bet you’re thinking it sounds like a dream. Well, it isn’t perfect and we have had a few hiccups along the way. We’ve already learned a lot in the past few weeks and we are surely going to learn more. And there is always going to be that global challenge of getting people to complete a process, login, or fill in a form, that they simply don’t want to do, even though they signed up for it 🤷‍♀️. Anyway that’s a whole other article altogether.

This new onboarding tool is just the start of things to come, as we get deeper into our customers wants, needs and expectations. This leaves room to improve and iterate on the services our customers experience as we continue to strive for the Eugene mission — to empower people with expert, convenient and compassionate healthcare — anytime, anywhere.