InfoArmor’s Administrator Portal
2019-2020
Research
Workshop Facilitation
Design Strategy
Prototyping
Product Design
Streamlining administrative tasks for HR Professionals to scale our business
HR Professionals in small businesses have too many manual tasks to do when they are administering employee benefits. They seem to be constantly importing, exporting, emailing, talking on the phone, and waiting to hear back. To reduce some of the chaos along with their headaches, we built an administrative tool for them to manage our offerings.
Internally, our teams are continually teaching HR Professionals how to transfer files securely and doing the back and forth that comes with cleaning up data files. This administrative tool helps them spend more time building client relationships and up-selling our offerings.
InfoArmor, now known as Allstate Identity Protection, provides identity protection services to over 4M Americans. In 2018, Allstate acquired InfoArmor for $525M to accelerate the business we started with Digital Safety.
CONTEXTLearning the business and identifying the opportunities
Being new to the company and the sole designer on this project, I needed to develop a deep understanding of the business, processes, customers, and internal teams. I cultivated new relationships, led a series of workshops, and aligned stakeholders to the vision.
“I’ve been in so many of these post-it note workshops, and this is the only one that felt like we accomplished something.”
- Feedback I received from a participant in the design-thinking workshop I facilitated
Process, rules, and security
As an identity protection provider, security is a top priority for us as a business. With that comes more rules, regulations, and processes. With disparate documentation, I dove into the details and created documentation that I used to communicate with my stakeholders throughout the project. As we collaborated on the vision, the entire product development team leveraged my documentation to define better solutions.
Aligning stakeholders on MVP and beyond
With a deep understanding of user needs and expected business outcomes, I developed a rollout strategy derived from co-creation workshops with the stakeholders. To establish proper expectations, I made sure that all stakeholders were aligned on the MVP scope.
THE SOLUTIONSecure file transfers for all
One of the biggest headaches for HR Professionals and internal teams involves the secure transfer of data files that contain employee Personally Identifiable Information (PII). HR Professionals need to build CSV files and use a seemingly archaic method of secure email. More often than not, our internal teams had to manually intervene and help clean up the files.
The import feature leads HR Professionals through the process of importing new enrollments and terminating existing ones.
Collaborative problem-solving for better solutions
With a new and close relationship with the engineering team, we proposed a scope change that created a better user experience and further increased efficiency. Originally, the plan was to leverage existing manual methods of processing files. Using my diagrams to discuss alternatives, the engineer lead suggested we re-prioritize our roadmap so that this solution could drive the development of an API to process the files instead. We worked together to document the proposed solution and gained approval from product leadership.
One of the benefits of the API solution was the ability to provide real-time feedback on the file transfer. For MVP, I designed an engineering-light solution that provided detailed error messages when data could not be imported.
Add & manage participants
Before this tool was available, HR Professionals had to call us or transfer a file to add or change even a handful of participants. Our internal teams spent up to 10 hours per week, individually, making seemingly mindless changes. I designed a simple Add Participant form that saves everyone time by allowing new records to be created with both past and future enrollment dates. Additionally, any errors can quickly be corrected by managing the individual participant records. Terminations, when employees leave, can be set for both the past and future as well.
Accurate reporting to get paid faster
Many of our clients’ accounting departments will not pay their invoices to us without reconciling it with a list of employees receiving the service. Some of our employees were spending 14 hours per month, individually, manually pulling error-prone SQL reports and securely emailing them to clients.
Matching the filter options of the data table to billing periods allowed both clients and internal teams to pull error-free reports in minutes.
THE RESULTSHappier Clients
This tool has set the bar for SMB benefits administration. Competitors and similar benefits providers have either old, clunky administration tools or none at all. Our clients are asking their other benefits providers to give them tools like this one.
Happier Employees
Our internal teams are spending less time doing mindless tasks and spending more time doing “their jobs,” which is their way of saying, “client development.” Account Managers’ jobs are to build relationships and deepen business deals to increase revenue. They are now spending more time doing just that.
Happier Bottom Line
This tool increased the efficiency of our internal teams, reduced our data security risks, reduced enrollment errors, and increased our file processing times. As we scale the business, it is expected to save $2.2M annually through gained efficiency alone.