Curology is a skincare tele-health company that focuses on making prescription skincare accessible to everyone. Patients can bring their specific skincare goals and needs to dermatology providers, who will consider their medical history and other factors and write a prescription for the patient. Curology has an integrated pharmacy where we compound our own specific custom formulas. We also have an integrated logistics and warehouse in house, so all aspects of the patient experience are controlled within Curology. Curology consists of 2 brands: Curology and Agency. Agency is identical in the way it functions, but offers formulas and an experience more focused on aging skin.
Roles played: User Research, Prototyping, Design Lead, Testing
Project done in 2022 over the course of ~2 months
Background + Goals
Curology introduced the Agency brand in 2021, and it was a rush to get it out the door. Since Agency and Curology share the same back end, transferring between the two brands seems like it would as simple as 1, 2, 3, right? Unfortunately as the brand launch was somewhat rushed, the process turned into something that was not well thought out, and required roughly 8 steps.
As we (myself and Marre Viikeri) took this project on we aimed for a few goals:
Reduce Customer Support time spent on the transfer process
Reduce dermatology provider time spent on the transfer process
Reduce dropoff of patients between brands.
Empathize
The first step we took was documenting and wrapping our heads around all of the steps included in the transfer process. We also documented the amount of time each step took for each type of team member. Overall the process took over 6 minutes for our customer success team as well as our provider team. It was time intensive for the patient, and as there were multiple touchpoints there was a lot of potential for patients to not finish the process.
A screenshot of the email success would send to transfer a patient between brands.
We did some digging through existing customer success data and found that patients were extremely unhappy with the transfer process.
One of the steps included an extremely wordy email that Support would send (pictured to the right) to the patient that would require the patient to respond to the email in a specific way, we consistently referred to the patient response as “the magic words.” There was a significant amount of collaboration and back and forth between a multitude of teams to confirm that simplifying this process was something we could do.
I led a series of meetings with the following teams to get clarity around the following questions:
Engineering : Is there a technical requirement to have any of these steps? Do we need to reset any information to successfully transfer them? How feasible is removing some of these steps?
Legal : What are we legally required to ask transferring patients? What do they need to consent to for the new subscription?
Medical : What do you need to know to determine someone’s eligibility? When do you want to write a new prescription? What do you need to know to effectively treat the patient?
Finance : Are there financial implications to making this process simpler?
Support : Is there a requirement for success to be involved in any of these steps?
After getting clarity and aligning on goals with all of the teams we had a solid understanding of a path forward.
We looked into customer success quotes from people who attempted to transfer:
“It is just too hard to try to switch from Curology to Agency. I haven’t had a Curology account for over a year. They want me to take new pictures and to purchase a one month supply before I can transfer. This is the most arcane situation. Can I please just get Agency this is my last chance I’m not gonna try this again.” - Curology customer
”Never got the email and still want to transfer to agency. This system is absolutely crazy. Why can’t I just join agency. This seems like an unnecessary step and I’m sure you’re losing an a lot of customers.” Curology customer
Our success rate for transfers was around 30%, meaning around 30% of people who attempted to transfer brands, ended up even doing it. If a user did not successfully transfer that meant we missed out of their monthly subscription business- we were literally leaving money on the table.
Define
We were able to distill it to these 3 main focus areas for our work:
Patients do not want to have to do multiple interactions to simply transfer brands.
Customer success does not need to be involved in the process to transfer.
Our transfer process needs to feel polished and part of our brand. (Not just a plain text email)
Prototype/Test
We approached the problems from our internal tools as well as keeping in mind the patient perspective.
We defined a new flow, where customer success did not have to be involved and a patient could request a brand transfer directly from their provider.
The patient experience we wanted to feel much more seamless than a weird plain email, so we mirrored an existing flow we had for re-subscribes.
This allowed our providers to see a much more formatted response that they could more easily digest versus an unformatted mess. Our providers were also able to easily transfer the patient and initiate the survey.
