Reducing user frustration, staff overwhelm and operational costs

Rewriting client communications for a health tech company

The Healios homepage

Who is Healios?

Healios is an online mental health, autism and ADHD service provider for young people and families.

Project overview

The problem

An internal report found that Healios clients cancelling or not attending their sessions was having a large negative impact on Healios operations.

The report highlighted the quality of Healios communications as a likely cause of clients' lack of engagement.

I led the project to rework our client communications and collaborated with stakeholders across the business.

Our goal

The goal of this project was to improve the emails and SMS sent to our clients.

Specifically we wanted to...

• Reduce the volume of calls and emails to the client support team
• Reduce the number of sessions where the client cancelled or didn't attend
• Increase clients' satisfaction

Project details

The process

Several steps were necessary to successfully complete the project:

1. Discovery - Understanding client journeys and the comms they receive
2. Ideation - Collaborating with stakeholders on changes to be made
3. Writing - Writing and rewriting based on stakeholder feedback
4. Testing - Gathering user feedback and testing for errors before going live



The process followed

Changes made to client communications

The changes I made can be broken into five categories:

1. Implementing progressive disclosure
2. Improving readability
3. Fixing errors
4. Preventing user error
5. Improving operations



More specifically, the changes I made included...

• Fixing spelling, grammar and punctuation errors
• Improving visual hierarchy
• Paying attention to tone of voice
• Using clear language to reducing ambiguity*
• Giving each email one purpose to focus on
• Moving supplementary information to landing pages
• Surfacing relevant information at the right time — not too early, not too late

*This item was especially important considering the main audience is autistic individuals (and their families) who do best with clarity and certainty.



My documentation included tracking each change made and why

These changes were also made to SMS

Most automated emails also had a corresponding SMS that was sent to the client at the same time.

Rewriting the SMS had an additional challenge as I was tasked with reducing the length of each SMS. This is because, when sent, each SMS is broken down into sections, and Healios is charged by the number of sections sent.

The changes to SMS length alone were estimated to save £600/mo in operational costs.



The client journey was complicated with many different pain points

Example of a rewritten email

The welcome email was originally a whopping 600+ words

Too much information was packed into the welcome email, especially for the first piece of correspondence clients received from Healios.

Clients were consistently confused, overwhelmed and frustrated by this email in particular.



The rewritten email

The rewritten welcome email focused on the most important details, taking it from 600+ words and reducing it to 111 words.

Project outcomes

I'm pleased to share that we had a great outcome from updating the client communications.

We had...

• fewer clients cancelling or not attending sessions
• a reduction in clients calling or emailing the support team
• positive feedback from the client support team and stakeholders
• minimum £600/mo reduction in operation costs