ux designer
Holistic Hands
Massage Therapy & Wellness
A service design case study that demonstrates implementing design thinking to business & service flows, improving profitability by 167%.
About the project
This is a retrospective case study that reflects how I intuitively implemented design thinking & service design in my previous business. Having completed my UX education, I realized I had been executing service design strategies during my time as an entrepreneur, and now have greater understanding of why I was so successful.
The goal
Discover what enhances the massage therapy experience while setting a standard for professionalism and safety for both the therapist & clients alike and answering the question of how to improve profitability without sacrificing the quality of service & care.
The challenge
The outcome
Holistic Hands Massage Therapy & Wellness, a solo practice scaling into a new private location, needed to figure out the best way to cover the cost of the new space while attracting & retaining new clients. The business owner wanted to address several concerns, streamlining her process to reduce the time & energy spent on administrative duties to focus more on delivering valuable client experiences & increasing revenue.
The business doubled its monthly massage bookings & increased revenue by 167%. The business achieved a 90% client retention rate with a 60% client referral rate. Overall, this project was a success in terms of streamlining business flows as well as client satisfaction.
Approach
After identifying & prioritizing key opportunities for improvement, I began researching to better understand the current market, my clients & building strategies to improve business flows and enhance the client experience.
Holistic Hands Massage Therapy & Wellness, a passionate & purpose driven practice would set the standard of professionalism and go beyond client expectations to deliver a highly-valuable therapy and exceptional client experience.
Elevating client experience.
In conducting market research & a competitive analysis, I was able to uncover common client frustrations, desired expectations, and an ideal target audience.
Based on this research I implemented the following strategies:
-
Moving to a location with private entrance, private bathrooms & a secured waiting area to elevate & establish the practice as professional, trustworthy & safe.
-
Services & treatment plans that we're customizable to share my knowledge & skill.
-
Creating a collaborative, empowering environment to assist clients in receiving the full benefit of our work together.
-
Enhancing the client's experience of the whole service right down to how they would perceive the room & their body after treatment.
Based on feedback received after implementation the business reported a 98% client satisfaction rate & a 20% increase in client referrals.
Identifying the types of clients who sought out individual massage therapist vs. going to a spa was a crucial step in deciding what services to prioritize.
User persona: representing the identified target audience.
Optimizing client scheduling & onboarding.
After analyzing the scheduling & onboarding process from both the client & business perspective I was able to identify that adopting an online scheduling system would be highly beneficial for both parties:​
Business benefits:
-
Time saving & cost-effective.
-
Easy to implement & test.
-
Automated reminders alleviated missed appointments.
-
Improved onboarding with easy to complete forms.
-
Reduce lost revenue from missed phone calls.
-
More client feedback.
Client benefits:​
-
View provider availability anytime, anywhere.
-
Schedule at their leisure.
-
Reminders
-
Easy to complete forms, that could be done prior to their visit.
-
Advanced payment options.
-
More focused time with their therapist.
90% of clients had positive response. The business saw a 20% increase in bookings, occurrences of missed appointments reduced to 3%, and I saved an average of 5 hours/week.
Client journey maps: demonstrating the clients journey before and after implementation of online schedulng.
6 different software solutions were tested to address the issues with scheduling & loss of revenue. Clients were regularly surveyed to determine which was the easiest & most pleasurable for them to use, also considering the cost effectiveness of the solution and the features it offered to reduce time spent on administrative tasks.
Prioritizing revenue generating activities.
I desired to create a most effective strategy for addressing administrative responsibilities to focus more on client care.
In my analysis it became apparent there was:
-
An exorbitant amount of time lost on insurance billing, totaling around 12 hours of unpaid time per month.
-
Insurance clients equated to 30% of monthly bookings.
-
Risk - either take on more workload or discontinue accepting insurance.
The solution was to discontinue insurance and simply charge the clients the same rate as insurance payout. 80% of clients happily accepted this offer, saving time & energy with little to no loss in revenue.
In conclusion
Taking a really hard look at my growing business from different perspectives and objectively considering which solutions would align both business goals and client goals.