Published by olivia.wright@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 26.07.2023 
2023 has heralded an incredible year for a new agency/client partnership between The Distance and GoodShape. Joining forces at the start of the year, the pair have found working together a win-win situation which they hope to segment at this year’s UK Business Tech Awards in the App of the Year category.
GoodShape engaged The Distance to support its digital agenda, with the introduction of a native mobile app to digitally transform GoodShape’s health and wellbeing service for enterprise employees.
As an app and a business, GoodShape focuses on reducing the personal and financial impacts of work absences resulting from injury, physical or mental ill-health, through methods including interventions, smarter referrals, and reliable management tools. GoodShape supports both public and private sector employers where absence could seriously impact workplace culture, operational capabilities, or service quality.
The GoodShape app is used by employees to manage their well-being and their work absences. It provides a tailored back-to-work programme to support the employee’s healthy return to work, as well as facilitating direct access to clinical staff and a wealth of health and wellness content.
In total, the app includes 42 categories of clinical content, 374 unique well-being activities that are assembled into curated daily care plans for users, 31,000 words of medical advice, 26 demonstration and exercise videos and full medical profiles. Underpinning the app’s content and support offering, a 24/7 chatbot engages the user and hosts their in-app experience.
The GoodShape app culminates the successful collaboration of clients, agencies, and two supportive software providers. This partnership worked closely to deliver a unique app solution that will benefit thousands of users around the world through supporting their health, and wellbeing at work.
I was most impressed with The Distance’s documentation, which was head and shoulders above everything else. I can’t overstate how comprehensive and detailed their feature document was — it gave us confidence. They delivered 140 pages in the finest detail imaginable; it included every piece of text on every screen of the app.
James Arquette – Chief Product Owner at GoodShape
To maximise the success of the project The Distance introduced EBM to deliver a first-class user experience, replacing the traditional form-based data collection process with a chat-bot interface. Humanising the process and making the app much more engaging.
The partnership has continued to grow and the pair are now also working with Terra to bring health and fitness data into the platform from various third-party sources. This will further support GoodShape’s ability to provide employees with the best possible advice and support during any absence from work.
The app has proved to be a hit with clients and end users. After a comprehensive review showed that the project had exceeded all of its objectives, our partnership reconvened to design, approve and publish a 12-month roadmap of new features, while bringing forward and significantly increasing project budgets. Our roadmap will deliver a continually improving product that pushes the boundaries of user engagement through its intuitive, humanised, chat-based interfaces.
The project has been a great opportunity for The Distance to showcase its talents both technically and in customer service, having introduced two other technical suppliers it demonstrates what success looks like when companies appreciate each others expertise
Anthony Main – Founder of The Distance
The GoodShape app is already a win for professionals’ health and productivity as well as the partnership, so there’s plenty of fingers crossed for the award to further celebrate that success!
Follow The Distance on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Follow GoodShape on Twitter and LinkedIn, or download the app for Apple and Android.
