CASE STUDY: BRIGHT HORIZONS
Verinext provides a mobile app for users to streamline reservation services and improve the user experience.
ABOUT BRIGHT HORIZONS
Bright Horizons Family Solutions® is the foremost brick-and-mortar provider of early education and preschools, employer-sponsored childcare, back-up care, educational advisory services, and work and life solutions.
The company collaborates with more than 1,100 employers worldwide to build family-friendly workplaces to support today’s working parents. In addition to its full-service child care centers.
INDUSTRY: Child Care
LOCATION: United States and International Locations
WEBSITE: brighthorizons.com
Bright House works with companies to provide backup care services, which parents can leverage if their regular child care needs to be supplemented, and offers employees a safety net when unforeseen circumstances prompt unscheduled childcare needs.
THE CHALLENGE
Provide a mobile app for users to streamline reservation services and improve the user experience.
To utilize this safety-net service, parents reserve care by contacting Bright Horizons’ 24×7 call center, or by visiting their website. Frantically visiting a website or filling out forms on a phone is a cumbersome process at best, particularly given the ease of requesting service through a mobile app.
Bright Horizons was concerned about how many reservations the app would be able to handle. However, after diving into the analytics, they realized people were using the app for reasons other than just making reservations. Many users were double-checking the application to confirm their reservation, cancel a reservation, or review their profile information.
To complicate matters, application use was much broader than originally anticipated, and the requested features needed to be tied into the legacy platform, with the flexibility to pivot to the new design platform already under construction. We quickly discovered users were likely to take several different paths when making backup care reservations.
“Since our users are working parents who are rushing around from meeting to meeting, we wanted to simplify the reservation process and make it a quick and easy task to check off their list.” Andrew Williams, Director of Product Management, Bright Horizons
We lacked any mobile application development experience, so we turned to Verinext, whose proven expertise in mobile strategy and solutions has made them an industry leader.
Verinext was critical to helping us understand how different scenarios would be represented in the mobile app.
—Andrew Williams, Director of Product Management, Bright Horizons
THE SOLUTION
Verinext focused on addressing the users’ most critical need—booking reservations—rather than trying to squeeze all of the ‘bells and whistles’ into the first version of the app.
Verinext knew the success of its clients’ mobile applications drives revenue and helped them achieve their business goals. The user-centric company took an agnostic approach to user interactions in mobile applications and utilizes multiple entry channels, along with native elements and modalities to create frictionless mobile experiences.
Verinext began by conducting user story workshops to determine how most individuals would engage with the mobile application and determined that it made more sense to focus on addressing the users’ most critical needs.
“When first introduced, fewer than 1% of reservations were made via the new mobile application, but growth came quickly. “Now we lead with our mobile application and a QR code so users can easily download it right at work.” —Andrew Williams, Director of Product Management, Bright Horizons
Success Highlights
- Allow users to build a complete customer profile
- Touch ID for thumbprint authentication
- GPS and location services
THE RESULTS
Bright Horizon’s customers reduced friction and frustration to help make lives easier.
Today, mobile app users can input just about any information needed to build a complete customer profile. New dynamic features have also been added, such as the ability to copy and edit reservations, Touch ID for thumbprint authentication, GPS to get directions to the closest childcare center, and medical-form scanning and submission.
This application reduces frustration and friction and literally makes users’ lives easier by not forcing them to call or log-in to the computer. Our customer interactions are seamless because Verinext focused on making the mobile application as easy as possible to use.”
—Andrew Williams, Director of Product Management, Bright Horizons