Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan
Re-envision the experience to put covered members in control of their health insurance.
A simplified mobile experience that reduced the time spent expensing claims and increased engagement by 400%.
To enable users on the go, the first version of Alberta School Benefit Plan's (ASEBP) mobile app was launched in 2012. Four years later, ASEBP recognized that the app was delivering diminished value to their members and hindering the future they envisioned. Recognition of technical limitations coincided with sweeping business changes: it was the perfect time to re-imagine their app for the next decade.
If you haven’t heard of ASEBP, here is a bit of background: ASEBP provides wellness and health benefits services tailored to people who work in the K to 12 Education sector. They pride themselves on their customer care, striving to be health champions for their members. Their membership is approximately 65,000 across Alberta, with steady growth every year.
They value the ability of their members to submit claims with ease, so when they received feedback that the experience was confusing and did not allow for smooth claim submission, ASEBP engaged DevFacto to explore new concepts and ideas. The team at DevFacto had knowledge of the existing technical complexities, and were eager to help ASEBP move forward as innovators and leaders in the mobile app claim process.
We were proud to collaborate with ASEBP on this journey. We worked with a team of stakeholders at ASEBP to align on an ideal state. Our ideation sessions engaged the team in blue sky thinking – as health champions, what would they most like to see in the new mobile app?
We identified some initial important improvements:
With these improvements in mind, the team at DevFacto got to work on what would become the My ASEBP mobile app. Following a scrum framework, the team created a backlog of items ordered by business value – ensuring important features were developed first. By implementing these features as early as possible, we were able to test and improve them quickly. Supported with tools like Figma, a fluid design approach was essential to the collaborative process with the ASEBP team.
As the mobile app project moved along, we found that timing was a challenge. Communication and collaboration needs changed as teams moved through design and development, and then prepared to launch. Risk is involved in any challenge, and we found our biggest risk was having two different projects being implemented by two different teams simultaneously.
While this team kicked off the mobile app project, a second team at DevFacto was working diligently to get ASEBP’s web app updated. Not having these two projects in lockstep was a source of frustration. We worked very hard to ensure each team communicated their updates. The lesson we learned is that the alignment of internal project timelines was critical.
Throughout the challenges of the development, the product owner was incredibly understanding. They were an integral part of guiding the app development process, and were very driven to achieve successful outcomes. Through this relationship, we are honored to say we established incredible trust between the DevFacto and ASEBP teams.
The new and improved My ASEBP mobile app has been very well received by members, school jurisdictions, and the ASEBP team. It was designed to be an intuitive experience, with users spending less than a minute on average within the app. Member reviews confirmed that claims take significantly less time to submit.
25%
reduction of pages
+400%
app usage
1/4
of all claims
The mobile app development team had wonderful engagement from every business group at ASEBP, and the resulting work was very successful because of the sound strategy built with DevFacto's Innovation Framework. The strong partnership continued when a team of developers from both ASEBP and DevFacto was formed to build the app.
Since the launch of the new app in September 2016, the number of active mobile app users has increased by almost 400%! The number of claims submitted through the app continues to grow.
We are so proud of the collaborative relationships we built with everyone at ASEBP over the course of this project. These relationships based on openness and trust were key to delivering an app with the impact they needed. ASEBP’s commitment to their members’ ease of use truly defines them as a health champion.
2016