Forma Run-Out Feature Enhancements
This enterprise-grade feature enables organizations to provide employee benefits with flexible reimbursement schedules, giving them more time to support employees with diverse lifestyles.
Overview
Forma offers a run-out feature that enables customers to configure benefit accounts with varying reimbursement policies. However, after a few months, customers like Salesforce—which uses this feature extensively for its global workforce of 70,000 employees—reported that their employees were experiencing significant issues. These problems severely disrupted satisfaction (NPS dropped by 400% month over month) and led to escalations to Salesforce leadership about potentially terminating their service-level agreement (SLA) with Forma. Upon joining Forma, I took ownership of this project by diagnosing the escalation issues and leading the discovery and planning process for an enhanced experience. The initiative soon became a top priority for the 2025 roadmap.
Research
Observation: Quantitative research (account-level reports) shows that for our customer Salesforce, three months after transitioning to Forma as their new benefits provider, their most-used LSA account—the "Wellbeing reimbursement program"—exceeded its allocated calendar year budget by over $500,000. Additionally, Salesforce employees reported difficulties getting wellbeing expenses reimbursed, leading to complaints to both benefits administrators and Forma's support team. NPS trends reflected this dissatisfaction, as monthly NPS scores dropped from 75 to 40, then to -20 within a quarter (compared to the average NPS range of 65–78 for other Forma customers).
Analysis: Investigation revealed that an enabled run-out feature in the "Wellbeing" account triggered an unexpected reimbursement behavior. The system began pulling from employees' future benefits funds to pay for past expenses. For example, an October expense filed in November would draw funds from October, November, December, and subsequent months until fully paid. This behavior did not align with Salesforce's expectations for how their wellbeing account should be configured. Furthermore, employees struggled to locate unused funds from previous months in their member portal, and the lack of clarity about how to use these funds created ongoing difficulties with accessing benefits.
Insight: Clear communication gaps exist in conveying feature capabilities and limitations during the account configuration process. Earlier and better expectation-setting with customers is needed, especially for customers who have pre-existing understanding of certain product features through past benefits providers. Additionally, the existing feature falls short on usability and end-user experience, making it difficult for employees to discover and understand their benefits effectively.
Opportunity
Decouple runout behavior and reimbursement system behaviors
This approach immediately addresses the account "overspending" issue by locking fund allocation for "past expenses" to past balances, which more precisely delivers the intended runout feature functionality.
Address experience gaps through phased enhancements
In the short term, make funds and balances more discoverable for employees as they browse benefits and file reimbursement claims using past balances. In the mid-term, help employees understand the distinction between using current versus unused past balances, as runout period policies apply. Additionally, guide employees to use the runout feature strategically for multi-month expenses (e.g., monthly-billed gym memberships or utility bills).
Design solution
Feedback
Salesforce's benefits team reviewed design proposals and loved the approach of enhancing the discoverability of unused balances. We discussed creating "custom phrases" like "current/runout/future balances" but dropped this idea since employees are not well-versed in benefits terminology—"available balance" and "unused balance" seem clearer.
The benefits team also had concerns about making the information architecture clearer for employees filing multi-month expenses, so we brainstormed using tailored subcategories to better classify this type of expense.
Improvements
For customers
I explored several ways to display unused balances, considering that the display is conditional—employees who don't accumulate unused balances won't see it at all. I also explored the depth of information in a "maximum scenario" where an employee can accumulate up to 6 months of unused balances as permitted by program policy. However, this could introduce friction in applying the correct balance accurately.
For internal teams (i.e., claim reviewers)
I made unused balances visible on the claim details page to streamline approval and rejection decisions. I also worked with engineering to add system defaults that cross-check eligibility and applied balances. These checks ensure that inefficient balances from a past month (e.g., $0 from September balance) trigger automatic rejections, giving employees clear expectations that no reimbursement will follow.
Testing
Phase 1: Gather first-hand customer feedback through regular syncs to refine design concepts, address custom needs, and explore how policy integration can enhance the experience.
Phase 2: Provide Salesforce's benefits teams with beta access to test the end-to-end employee experience, allowing for iteration before a broader release.
Phase 3: Expand access to other customers who have run-out feature enabled for their LSA accounts (e.g., Microsoft, Datadog, BetterUp, Figma), incorporating learnings from earlier phases to continuously improve the experience.
Outcome
The project isn't released yet, but it impacts a few key areas:
Roadmap & Leadership Buy-In: While this feature is technically complicated, making it difficult for founders to explain its capabilities (incl. bugs and experience regressions), I made their work easy through diagrams, journey maps, and concept prototypes. It helped the leadership team to commit to enhancement ideas and embrace my priority pivots during the roadmap planning.
Design & Research Contributions: By leading discovery and quantifying customer pain points through reporting tools, drilling into NPS & PSAT surveys on Sprig, analyzing support tickets on Sentisum, and reviewing recorded user sessions on Smartlook, I loved synthesizing all findings to create an aligned and insight-driven understanding of customer issues across teams. Bringing order out of its chaotic start was fulfilling and fun!
Testimonials
"Thanks for jumping into this project in your first week with Forma. Even with all the context around this feature, I found it difficult to explain to customers. You made the concept so clear and easy to grasp." — Jason Fan, CEO
"Knowing Salesforce isn't an easy client, this team has gone above and beyond to pull it off. The run-out enhancements in the QBR scored a new record." — Matthew Blood, Enterprise Account Executive
Learnings
Broad Product Strategy: While the run-out feature enables full customization for customers to set their preferred run-out period (in days, weeks, or months), customers could benefit from more insights from Forma. For example, Salesforce has a monthly employee account reset schedule and an unusually long eligible period for filing run-out claims—6 months (which is unique among Forma customers). The best way to configure this is to consider both the account reset/renewal cadence and eligible period together. One alternative would be to either shorten the existing run-out period from 180 days to 30 days, or extend the account reset/renewal cadence from 30 days to 180 days. Both options would create a matching cadence, giving employees a consistent, flexible window to access high-dollar funds and make full use of the extended time.