Kindercare
Applying a 'Family obsessed' mindset to digital transformation
How one of the nation's largest childcare providers reimagined their digital family experience.
Industry
Childcare
Time on the account
2 years
Agency/Consultancy
Method
Context
Working in support of KinderCare’s Digital Family Experience (“DFE”) initiative to understand and document the holistic family and centre experience
Across 8+ work-streams, the team identified opportunities to enhance the digital experience, overall family experience, supporting technology infrastructure and organisational effectiveness of KinderCare.
Problem
Historically Kindercare had focused digital solutions to service childcare centre and staff needs. Helping them shift that strategy to be family first presented many important problems to be solved.
Three main problems were identified for families
Payments, family portals, communications and center information were all in different places.
Parents inquiry needs (like pricing and availability) were not being met online.
Account activations and payments online were frustrating parents.
Objective
To connect a disparate experience for parents and help them complete simple tasks (i.e. payment, enrolment), we worked to vision, redesign and support deployment of a new authenticated portal experience. Taking advantage of all insights gained to date we rapidly defined requirements, use cases and worked using real family narratives to present and gain consensus across many stakeholders.
Three key objectives guided us in redesign
Design a single point of reference (a new parent app) designed for a family first CX
Help Kindercare shift their CX strategy from focused on centers to being 'family obsessed'.
Meet parent needs in better quality, more transparent inquiries and better digital services.
Understanding and mapping the family experience
Leading to KinderCare finally understanding the full reality of the current family experience –from the inquiry to enrollment process, billing and payments, communications and enrolled family touchpoints.
The effort resulted in 1000’s of identified opportunities identified, prioritized and actioned against.
Human insights we uncovered
Some key findings from the synthesis and mapping stage were; the payments system did not match parents expectations, inquiry to enrolment was taking too much of center directors time and waitlists were being managed manually and not always fair.
Mobile traffic, despite a very poor mobile UX
Center directors are covering for the bad digital experience
Setting a vision and strategy
Partnering closely with key stakeholders of the KinderCare leadership team, we defined an emotive, family-centric vision for the newly formed DFE (Digital Family Experience) initiative within the organization. This vision became a rallying cry for KinderCare, resulting in materials such as vision statements, experience principles, a organizational charter and a future state narrative that demonstrated the true power of DFEs new vision.
Parents needed help understanding and making payments easier
Parents are having to work too hard to understand invoicing and make payments
"Invoicing line items are a hot mess"
Parent quote - 2022 research study
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Challenges we overcame
Keeping 27+ client stakeholders aligned and up to speed on design progress required frequent co-design sessions and 'loom' progress notes.
Integrating multiple portals and services into one app experience required carefully planned alignment, integration and testing.
Results and outcomes
Enhanced family experience through deep understanding of customer needs and tactical design outputs to advance the business and organizational goals around Digital Family Experience
Accelerated in-house development of CX capabilities by acting as extension of internal team as a more formal CX offering continues to be stood up within KinderCare.
Reduced complexity and cost of content related processes and systems via consolidation and standardization, with higher content quality.
“Above all, Rohan has been a cornerstone for our growth, leveraging his expertise across workstreams and becoming a trusted partner to dozens of individuals—I firmly believe that there are few people (even internally) who have had a larger impact on the success of our digital transformation.”
Josh Bathon
Director of CX | KinderCare
