Bluebird Care

Previously unable to engage three disparate audiences on one website, the home healthcare franchise business was missing out on potential service buyers, employees, and franchises. And confusing everyone. Adopting a user-centric approach, we simplified the experience by gaining deep understanding of their needs by creating three distinct customer journeys to improve the CX for every user.

Taking good care of three distinct audiences

As a healthcare at home organisation, Bluebird couldn’t be more people-focused. Its whole world is people: the people who need and arrange care, the people who provide the care, and the people who make the whole care infrastructure happen.

But people bring complexity. Those who need care is a constantly evolving cycle, with care needs that are ever-changing. Carers leave the job and need to be replaced. And being a franchise business, Bluebird continually needs more franchisees to expand its business and keep its revenues healthy.

Improving customer journeys

The issue for Bluebird’s website was in attempting to speak to these three disparate audiences. It wasn’t working. As a result, neither the buyers of care, the care providers nor the care franchisees were getting what they wanted. Recognising it needed to improve its customers’ digital experience, Bluebird charged Distinction with the task of finding a way to speak to its mixed audience in a way that was relevant to everyone.

Learning a few home truths

Being a people-focused organisation made our decision to put people at the centre of the new website even easier than ever. Their needs would show the way forward. So we embarked on a series of discovery sessions, and talked in separate workshops to the people who were arranging care for loved ones, to the carers themselves, and to the franchisees. Each provided invaluable insight into their real needs, and what they expected as an ideal from the Bluebird website.

During our workshops, we witnessed their current frustrations, and heard what their unmet desires were. We listened, we learnt. Thanks to our experience of running workshops, we discovered the picture was, in reality, even more sophisticated than first thought.

Unpicking a fragmented audience

Carers, for example, comprised of several different personas. For example, there’s the fresh talent, straight out of school, keen on a career in care. Next there’s the experienced carer, simply looking to jump from one job to the next. Then there’s the person who’s experienced care first hand – perhaps providing in ad hoc for a parent – who recognises their ability and potential for a caring career.

For franchisees, the situation is even more complex and challenging. Franchisees come in all shapes and sizes, from those serving many homes to those serving a few, from being well established to being brand new, from having a structured interview process and style to having something different. For Bluebird, marshalling franchisees was like shepherding cats. The result was an inconsistent, off brand muddle.

Putting the website user first

A clear indication that we were on the right track occurred in a Hilton Hotel workshop for franchisees. Whereas once the collected attendees were protesting “we need people to give us things that do this, do that, do the other,” suddenly the mood changed. Like a ripple through the room, it dawned on everyone that it was not about them, it was about their customers and the people they relied on to conduct their business efficiently. They put themselves in other people’s shoes and recognised for themselves the value of a customer-centric approach.

Thanks to everyone’s commitment to the project, through the stimulus of healthy debate and the intelligence of the client team, this project grew into a wonderfully edifying experience, one which delivered great outcomes to the three different audiences, all of whom became better off by putting someone else first.