Redesigning the Chime On-boarding Process

HelloChime.com (aka: Chime) is an on-demand babysitting service of Sittercity's, where pre-screened sitters can be hired at the tap of a button. I was brought on to Sittercity to help with an on-boarding issue they had with Chime. The issue: they were losing money with every sitter they were on-boarding to the Chime platform.

When I was brought on, their on-boarding process looked like this:

• A potential sitter signed up on HelloChime.com

• A team of internal recruiters, stationed in each of the five cities Chime had launched in, would reach out to the potential sitter to schedule an in-person interview at their remote office

• The sitter would then come in for an interview, which would be recorded

• Pending a positive background check, the sitter would be approved or denied

• If approved, the video for the interview would be sent out to a 3rd party production house for editing

• Once the edited interview was received by the Chime team, they would post it to the sitter’s Chime profile and they would be activated’

Insight

After taking a thorough deep-dive into the on-boarding process, and conducting stakeholder interviews, and digging into the numbers, I discovered the issue was two-fold: 1) sitters were not showing up to their interviews, and more importantly 2) the overhead of the remote office and the video editing was more than the customer lifetime value of a sitter. And thus, they were losing money on every sitter they on-boarded.

The Solution

Immediately, I began working with several internal Chime team members to re-envision this process. We knew we had to do away with our remote offices and figure out a way to get more sitter to show up to interviews. With that in mind, we quickly set up a multivariate tests to see what conversion looked like when parents were presented with: lower-fidelity sitter interview videos vs. the current high-fidelity, professionally edited videos vs. no videos.

We found that the low-fidelity videos converted similarly to the high-fidelity videos, so we knew we had a win there. We could do away with paying for the professional editing.

From there, we began operationalizing the process with the goals of economic efficiency and in creating a better user experience for sitter’s on-boarding—that would eventually get more sitters to actually come to their interviews.

We did that by getting sitter recruiters to come in-house, conduct and record the interviews via Google Hangouts–similar to what we had done in the multivariate test–and hired them full-time, whereas previously they were only part-time.

We then developed a process for editing videos using QuickTime, so that the recruiters could edit all of the videos themselves.

This allowed us to get rid of the remote offices, not have to hire the production house for editing, and by bringing the recruiters on full-time, they were able to schedule and edit more interviews and do it more quickly and efficiently.

Optimizing the Process

That left us at a point where we had optimized the onboarding process towards economic efficiency, but we still had the issue of sitter not showing up for interviews. Although, to note, once we made the interviews remote, the no-show rate decreased by nearly 45%, but it was still a major issue. About 33% of sitters still weren’t showing up for their interviews.

To address this issue further, we began by sending out a survey to current sitter to see what forms of communication they checked most often: text, email, or phone/voicemail. The overwhelming response was that sitters checked their texts most often.

So, we decided to meet sitters where they were at, and instead of emailing them requests and updates for their interviews like we had previously, we began texting them.

That brought the no-show rate down to less than 10%!

And from there, we began to finesse how we communicated with sitters. We started using more direct language which, over time, continued to improve on the no-show rate.

End all be all: customer acquisition cost has been reduced by 58% to date, and Chime is now profitable.