User , Startups , Client Stories — 01.31.2022
How Product Design Helped Increase Plan Forward’s Revenue by 500% in 12 months
The population of people without dental insurance is growing, and dental offices across the country are beginning to offer alternatives to traditional dental insurance. To get one of these membership plans started, dentists face heavy overhead costs and the administrative headache of creating, managing, and billing.
Enter Plan Forward, a software solution for dentists that quickly creates and powers their dental membership plans, allowing them to grow their patient base and recurring revenue. Plan Forward helps dentists offer affordable dental care to people who need it, and they simplify administrative tasks. Though the product addressed an important issue, it needed improvement to make the user experience simple, effective and delightful. So Plan Forward came to Innovatemap.
Problem
Megan Lohman, financial coordinator turned tech founder, seized the opportunity to digitize dental care membership plans to make the process more efficient and accessible. She had a product in market that was selling, but it wasn’t scaling with her customer base. Megan said, “Our product MVP was needing a change, both from a design and functionality perspective. It was starting to create a negative user experience.”
Together, we made Plan Forward’s product more enjoyable to use.
Solution
Plan Forward’s product — new, improved, and delightful to use — equipped Plan Forward to increase its revenue dramatically in the last year while helping thousands of people receive dental care.
Our primary objective was optimizing Plan Forward’s product so it could scale more effectively and remove some of Megan’s workload. To do this, our product designers improved the UX and made the product more intuitive to use, streamlined the transaction flows and eliminated human data entry errors.
Lacey Lavies (Executive Partner, Product Strategy & Client Experience) said, “we spent a lot of time with Megan to understand what usability problems were in the software and where people were having challenges day to day.” Then, we created solutions.
Our product management team streamlined transaction flows, how money moves from billing to collection and payouts, and then we redesigned the look and feel of the application in terms of how people navigate through the product. The onboarding feature exists to simplify and digitize new membership.
To help Plan Forward stand out in a crowded market, we started with positioning, messaging and buyer personas. We looked at what Plan Forward already had and where we could make it better. We were really clear about their value prop and key differentiators so we could equip them with what they needed to stand out in market.
Next, we applied the positioning and messaging to their website and sales deck so that Plan Forward was communicating consistently across marketing and sales.
Takeaways
In such a crowded space, the product needed to stand out with incredible user experience, so we dedicated time to prioritizing the right problems and creating the best solutions.
Plan Forward was an outstanding engagement from the standpoint of identifying objectives and keeping the project laser-focused on what those objectives were.
Megan said, “After we finished our first project, I don’t know how else we would’ve accomplished the same thing without them. We’ve continued working with them on multiple projects since then. The team truly cared about our success and took a lot of pride over the product they were delivering.”
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