Financial Coach Goal Tracking - User Experience
2021
Project Context: My team worked on a digital product that trained people to be financial coaches. When someone completed the program, they got access to different tools that helped them grow and develop their coaching business and create clients. Our team consistently talked to our customers to learn more about the problems they faced day to day. As a product team, we were always working to improve the experience with our digital products and interactions with our team so that our coaches could serve their clients well.
Customer Journey
We looked at our overall customer journey to think through where there might be pain points or gaps. We knew there was a gap in the experience based on conversations with coaches in the program. Coaches were completing the training but not able to put what they learned into practice.
Initial Research
Through customer interviews with financial coaches in our program, our team was hearing a lot of the same pain points. Coaches felt stuck or they felt like they weren’t making any progress on growing their coaching business. They weren’t sure what they needed to be doing. When we asked them if they knew how many clients they wanted, they either didn’t really know or they didn’t know why that was their goal.
A few quotes from interviews with our coaches:
“I would like to go full time one day, but I don’t know what that looks like.”
“I feel lost when it comes to prospecting.”
“I know what to do, but I don't know where to start.”
“I am asking my clients to set goals, but I haven’t set goals for myself.”
The Problem
Financial Coaches are struggling to create clients and build their businesses because they feel stuck and aren’t sure what steps they should be taking.
Brainstorm
Our team saw a lot of opportunity here to help coaches apply what they learned in the training. We brainstormed different solutions to help coaches grow their businesses and create clients. Our ideas revolved around helping coaches set goals, increasing community, increasing prospecting, and increasing group calls attended. We tackled several of these that were low effort and high impact. Then we began discovering on how to help coaches set goals for their business and create a plan to reach those goals.
Hypothesis
After prioritizing the different solutions based on customer impact and business impact, we created a hypothesis for the solution we believed would have the biggest impact.
Hypothesis: If coaches know their business goals, how many clients they need to reach those goals, how much to charge, and how many conversations they need to have to create those clients, then they will have a framework to build their business more effectively.
Goal: Create a solution that helps financial coaches know their business goals and client goals and understand what they need to do to reach those goals.
Coach Goal Setting - Ideal Journey
As we started ideating on our hypothesis, we created an ideal customer journey to talk through what our solution might look like as coaches create goals and track numbers for their business. Coaches were on their own to keep up with goals and numbers for their businesses. Creating a journey map helped us see areas where we could improve the experience around helping them create clients and grow their businesses.
Initial Ideas
I created some initial sketches and wireframes to talk through potential solutions with the team and start to think about a quick version of a prototype that we could use to validate the solution.
Initial Prototype
We created a quick, basic working prototype of our initial idea of giving coaches a calculator that allowed them to enter their financial goals for their business and their client conversion rates and be able to see how many clients they should aim to have in the next year. It also shows them how many new conversations and consultations they need to have based on their current or average conversion rates.
Usability Testing
We did some customer interviews and usability testing with the first calculator prototype to validate that this calculator would be helpful and to understand how coaches might use it. We also received valuable feedback about things that coaches did not understand or things that were missing.
Further Ideation
We incorporated the customer feedback and explored ways to make changes to help bring clarity to the goals and the steps. We explored different ways to display the goals to the coaches so that they could keep track of their weekly, monthly, and overall goals.
Next Iteration
We launched another version of the goal calculator based on the coaches' feedback. This version allowed coaches to create their goal, save their goal, and then start tracking all of their numbers to reach that goal. As a coach had new conversations and consultations, they recorded each one and kept track of their progress towards their overall goal. They were also able to see their weekly, monthly, and overall goals. The smaller goals helped them have more actionable items for each week so that they made sure they stayed on track.
Summary
As our coaches set and tracked their goals, we measured how many coaches created a goal, how many were tracking against that goal, and did that affect the number of clients they created.