How Candid increased sales by 30% with better patient onboarding

Industry

Remote orthodontic care

Founded

2017

Company size

300+ employees

Since 2017, Candid has offered a simpler way to help people improve their smile. The company delivers custom clear teeth aligners straight to your door for 65% less than braces. Thanks to optical laser scans and advanced 3D printing, Candid’s board-certified orthodontists can remotely supervise treatments so customers get to skip time-consuming office visits.

Teledentistry is a new service so Candid’s ability to build trust and educate customers on the benefits of using clear aligners to straighten teeth has been a vital part of their success. Candid’s “Am I a Candidate” survey provides a safe space for potential customers to determine whether clear aligners are right for them. Optimizing Candid's “Am I a Candidate” survey on Formsort has increased sales by over 30%.

Key outcomes

• Tested against 27 form variants
• Enabled experimentation without coding
• Increased sales by over 30%

Client challenges: Off-the-shelf solutions lacked flexibility and security, but custom coding wasn't scaling with their demand

Cosgrove’s team of product managers, designers, and engineers are in charge of Candid’s entire online experience. While their existing survey worked, their home-grown infrastructure lacked flexibility, making testing new variants a cumbersome and engineering-intensive endeavor.

Co-founder and CIO, Lilla Cosgrove, explained “We chose to build our survey ourselves because in 2017 there weren’t off-the-shelf tools that would give us the flexibility to express our brand and to deeply integrate into our technology stack while ensuring the security we required as a healthcare business.” She felt they needed a more flexible and robust solution to better personalize their customer experience and to evolve alongside their increasingly complex marketing initiatives.

Formsort solutions: High fidelity branding, seamless integrations, and simple deployments

Still there were critical concerns with using a third party solution. The team at Candid started by evaluating existing off the shelf tools and found them underpowered.  With the exception of Formsort, there weren’t offerings that allowed Candid to stay on brand, maintain a consistent data set of events and answers, and integrate with the rest of their tools.

Branding

The survey was the starting point for the majority of their customers so it needed to be perfectly in sync with the broader look and feel of the Candid site. “We were very happy to see the incredibly fine-grained control of the UX available in Formsort” said Candid Senior Product Designer Ethan McDonald. “Even the smallest details like button shadow and our progress bar were re-creatable.”

Integrations

Staying in control of customer data and maintaining an accurate single source of truth was of paramount importance to Candid’s engineering team. The onboarding survey needed to integrate into the broader marketing tech stack so that their carefully curated customer journey could be instrumented and actioned upon.

Integrating with complex business logic was among the companies must have features. Candid uses a customer’s zip code as one input to surface the best treatment option available; if a customer is not within the service area of a Candid studio where their teeth can be easily scanned, they are instead presented with the option to order an impression kit. To achieve this type of complex decisioning-based on customer answers, Formsort integrates seamlessly with Candid’s backend APIs to handle custom conditional logic.

Iterations

After migrating the survey to Formsort, the Candid team began experimenting with survey variants to optimize for conversions. They tested several different variants including earlier branching of respondents based on problem type, changing up the look and feel of the form, and introducing testimonial pictures and video.

All of this testing could be done directly on the Formsort platform freeing up the engineering and product team to tackle other issues. Dan McClean, Director of Growth Product, explained “we push most of our users through a survey flow which tells them whether they are candidates for our company's product. We've been able to improve conversion rate through the survey substantially, and have increased sales at least 30% by optimizing the survey experience. Formsort makes it easy to make changes and push them live to customers.”

Results: Faster learnings, time savings and better conversion rates

Candid’s approach to ramping up Formsort involved splitting traffic between their existing in-house infrastructure and the same content on the Formsort platform. To compare the two systems, Candid measured kit and studio booking completion rates for eligible customers.

Learning faster

Formsort meaningfully lowered the activation energy required to improve their survey. Since getting started with Formsort, Candid has averaged over 27 published revisions per month ranging from small copy changes to larger content restructuring.

In the initial ramp-up phase Candid saw a meaningful lift in conversion rates as a result of the performance and stability of the Formsort platform; the content-controlled experiment resulted in an unexpected double digit percentage improvement in completions versus the original in-house infrastructure.

Saving time on development

With a rapidly expanding business, Candid's engineers needed to reserve their bandwidth for feature development, not form maintenance. As marketing requests for form updates started to become a burden, Formsort empowered the marketing and product team to make those changes themselves, saving countless engineering hours.

Better conversion rates

In the initial ramp-up phase Candid saw a meaningful lift in conversion rates as a result of the performance and stability of the Formsort platform; the content-controlled experiment resulted in an unexpected double digit percentage improvement in completion versus in-house infrastructure. Candid’s approach to ramping up Formsort involved splitting traffic between their existing in-house infrastructure and the same content on the Formsort platform. To compare the two systems, Candid measured kit and studio booking completion rates for eligible customers.

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