Project Description
Carema Consulting Helps BallotReady Educate Voters, Empower Customers for 2020 Election
BallotReady: Know Who You’re Voting For
BallotReady is a browser-based software solution that enables voters to make informed decisions about who they vote for in U.S. elections.
The platform provides voters with nonpartisan details on each candidate’s background and political positions, with online sources included, in order to relieve voters of the research process when making their voting decisions. When voters have determined a candidate aligns with their viewpoints, they can save their candidate selection within BallotReady and bring it to their polling place when they vote.
BallotReady also works directly with organizations and campaigns via their CivicEngine platform, which equips organizations to recruit candidates, create an educated voting experience and drive voter turnout.
Opportunities for Growth Through Change
Ahead of the general election in November 2020, BallotReady anticipated a rapid growth in customers to onboard onto CivicEngine, as well as thousands of voters to support—due in part to the increase in voters who are voting by mail for the first time as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. BallotReady was positioned for growth and the opportunity to improve and scale its capabilities to provide an exceptional customer and voter experience. With the help of Carema Consulting, BallotReady identified several key areas that, through improvement, would generate tremendous value for the organization, its customers, and voters.
Customer Onboarding
BallotReady followed a reactive onboarding process where it relied on customers to define what they wanted to achieve. This resulted in a lengthy process that delayed time to value for customers. BallotReady had an opportunity to become more proactive and prescriptive with onboarding.
Customer Feedback
BallotReady accepted product feedback from about 80% of customers during the onboarding process, which often interrupted onboarding and created a technical backlog of customization requests. BallotReady saw the need to refocus its onboarding process for customers to ensure they were being equipped for success in a capable platform, rather than being concerned with personal preferences for functionality.
Customer Requests
Customer requests arrived from several sources (email, support desk, sales) and were not aggregated into a single database. This made it difficult to analyze trends, develop meaningful metrics and understand how to streamline workloads. BallotReady had an opportunity to implement a more structured system for customer requests that would allow them to prioritize the development and delivery of enhancements.
Team Roles
BallotReady team members wore many hats as the business was evolving. This hurt productivity and created a training challenge based on the anticipated increase in hiring leading up to the election. By honing in on specific functions for teams and responsibilities for employees, BallotReady’s team members would be better equipped for success, leading to increased morale, productivity, and output to support a better customer and voter experience.
Hiring and Training
Anticipating one million support tickets tied to the 2020 general election, BallotReady knew it needed to overcome training and hiring challenges in order to greatly increase its support team’s bandwidth. In addition to honing in on team and role functions, BallotReady had an opportunity to streamline its hiring and training processes to get the right people into the right roles and help them become productive quickly.
Stepping Up for Customers and Voters
BallotReady partnered with Carema Consulting to create a seamless customer onboarding process as well as optimize and scale its support function in advance of the dramatic volume surge in support requests from both customers and voters. With the guidance of Carema Consulting, BallotReady was able to:
Improve Onboarding
BallotReady created a step-by-step onboarding plan that maps out milestones and includes a prescriptive approach to achieve a 10-day launch for all customers.
Eliminate Customization Requests
To remove customization requests from its onboarding process, BallotReady worked with Carema Consulting to produce new talk-tracks to help both customers and internal team members refocus ideas as feedback and move away from tracking these types of requests per customer. The BallotReady product team is able to digest and sort through customer feedback in a more productive manner, and customers can adhere to the 10-day onboarding plan while still feeling heard.
Educate Customers
BallotReady was able to begin educating customers on the organization’s engagement model, which helped streamline how customer requests are received. The new BallotReady Engagement model allows customers to view their requests in one place and allows BallotReady to better manage the flow of requests and calculate staffing needs.
Prioritize Support Requests
BallotReady implemented a plan to introduce a ticket triage process and tiered support. This model allows tickets to be assigned to the group who can most appropriately handle the tickets in order to increase throughput and focus training.
Empower Voters
BallotReady launched a state-by-state FAQ page and chatbot functionality to enhance the voter experience by promoting informative self-help options.
Develop Role Clarity
BallotReady team members were empowered with new role clarity and began to see Onboarding and Support as two separate functions. While these functions collaborate closely, new role clarity allows for more focused training, and Onboarding has transformed into a strategic function.
Ideal Results, Ahead of the Election
“The prescriptive onboarding process we developed with the help of Carema Consulting was a game changer. We approached onboarding in a new proactive way where we educated customers on what it takes to be successful and what their journey will look like. By refocusing the conversation, we were able to get customers successfully using the platform in 10 days and decrease product customization requests by over 90%!”
—Alexis Greco, Director of Customer Success, BallotReady
“We had run an analysis and knew we were going to need to be in a position to support upwards of 50K tickets a day as we approached Election Day. Carema Consulting led the development of a support workflow to maximize service and increase productivity of the existing staff, which helped ensure we could provide support to millions of voters, many voting by mail for the first time. With Carema Consulting’s expertise, we set up a support function focused on self-help models and tiered support. This model allows us to easily train new hires and have a team confident and ready to navigate through the increased volume, supporting over 150 customers to inform and turn out voters this year.”
—Aviva Rosman, Co-Founder and COO, BallotReady
