My Experiments With Habit Building (Under Construction)

In October 2023, I was tasked with improving the overall experience of the patients enrolled under paid care plans at Curelink after my long assignments of working with our on-ground sales team and our inside sales team.

I have orchestrated improvements in various spheres of patient care since then. In my series of articles on ‘My Experiments with Habit Building’ I will be reflecting on those improvements.

Some context on the CarePlans: Curelink offers extensive care programs that are packages of different types of wellness services specific and relevant to conditions. Like for pregnancy there is a care program by the name of Pregnancy CarePlan. Pregnancy CarePlan consists of the following wellness services:

1. Dietitian Consultation: Wherein, an experienced dietician connects with the patient over call and prepares a personalised diet plan for the patient.

2. Live Yoga Classes: Wherein, we conduct live yoga classes guided by an experienced pregnancy yoga expert every alternate day.

3. Mental Wellbeing Webinars: Wherein, an experienced psychologist takes up mental wellbeing topics related to problems faced by women during pregnancy. 

4. Special Sessions: In addition to the above, some special sessions we also conduct knowledge imparting sessions to make them aware about the body process, the problem, tips and tricks related to pregnancy like birthing classes and breastfeeding classes.

5. Chat Support: We also offer a whatsapp based chat support to the patients wherein they can ask any doubts or question from our team of trained wellness instructors.

This first part of this series is about improvements in the chat experience of the patients.

Problem Statement

When we started working on the idea of Curelink back in September 2021, the problem that we were trying to solve was that patients used to ask a lot of doubts from their doctors on WhatsApp that the doctor didn’t want to answer because it was time consuming. These doubts were 80% repeated and were non-medical in nature, meaning these could be solved with help of wellness experts.

Fast forward to September 2023, an average paid patient on our care plan was sending just 1 question every 3 days, that too in the first month after buying the plan.

I knew something was wrong as when we minutely checked the whatsapp of over 50 gynaecologists in the early days of Curelink we had seen a different story.

I sprung into action.

First thing first, I got a few data dashboards made to get a hold on how big the problem is and where actually the problem.

Why analytics: Because data doesn't just show you where you are; it illuminates the path to where you need to go.
Few key findings from the data

• As low as 20% of patients were sending more than 20 messages in their first month.

• Average number of messages sent to a patient in the first 30 days after payment was just 12.

• Percentage of patient who sent at least 1 message in the second week after payment was just 28%

• Percentage of patient who sent at least 1 message in the second and third week after payment was just 33%

The central inferences I could draw from all this information and some additional information was, people either asked a lot of questions or people just didn’t ask questions.

Sidenote: I am also a believer in the fact that data is not infallible and may be tainted by inaccuracies or pollution. So data is a tool and not the ultimate truth

So as my next step to dig deeper, I started talking to both the types of patients - The patients who didn’t ask questions and the patients who asked a lot of questions. And to do justice with the quote - ‘The customer doesn’t know what they want’  I also started to read the chat history of patients and became a dietician for 2 days myself (guided by Guru ChatGPT and other dieticians) to answer questions to the doubts sent by the patients.

One common thing that I got to know from every 3rd person I talked to was satisfied with the answer they were receiving but some amount amount of dissatisfaction with the amount of the time it took for queries to be answered,

I went back to the data again. I came to know that our average TaT for the questions asked is a whopping 30 mins.
That means that if a patient wants to know whether they can add a cheese slice to their burger or not or if they should buy papaya as a pregnant mother while shopping in the supermarket, we have the answer to these questions when the burger had already been prepared or the person would have already bought papaya.

I realised our TaT was one of the biggest reasons why people were not able to build a habit of coming back to us as soon as they have a doubt.

Another data point that made it clear was that for the first 10 queries

Hence, to keep users engaged and make them keep coming back to your product offering, it becomes essential to create habits for your product and have them hooked onto your platform. Instagram, Twitter, Inshorts, Duolingo — these apps have very cleverly leveraged the Hooked Model to their core.

In Nir Eyal’s words — Product teams cannot buy retention or engagement, it needs to be built into their product itself. 

Therefore, a successful retention strategy is becoming more important for every product. This is where the Hooked Model comes into the picture.

The Hooked Model works in 4 phases.

The Hooked Model is a way of describing a user’s interactions with a product as they pass through four phases: a trigger to begin using the product, an action to satisfy the trigger, a variable reward for the action, and some type of investment that, ultimately, makes the product more valuable to the user. As the user goes through these phases, he builds habits in the process.

The Hooked Model defines 4 steps to creating habits that will help retain users in the app:

1. Trigger: An event that encourages someone to act, which is either an:

External trigger: something in the environment — a ping, a ding, or a ring — that alerts a person to do something.

Internal trigger: the desire to escape from an uncomfortable emotional state.

2. Action.:A behaviour that anticipates a reward — opening an app, scrolling a feed, checking a dashboard, or playing a video. The simpler the behaviour is to accomplish, the more likely the user is to do it.

3. Reward: The user gets what they came for.

4. Investment: The user puts something back into the product that makes it better the next time they use it.