A two front fix for the platform's most common user mistake
Context
Parents on a K-12 communications platform were routinely prompted at login when a new device or updated school data looked like it might belong to an existing account. The prompt was wordy and confusing, and a wrong tap merged two people’s accounts, the platform’s single most common user mistake.
Problem
Unmerging was brutal: names, org memberships, devices, children, and downstream tutoring data tangled across accounts, worked through three different internal tools whose data and actions didn’t even live on the same screens. Thirteen minutes per ticket, with real risk of making things worse, while the login flow kept manufacturing new tickets daily.
The decision
Run two fixes in parallel rather than sequence them. First, consolidate the cleanup: one Retool console where support could search by source link, device, or user ID and act on everything in one place. Second, and more importantly, stop the mistakes at the source: replace the ambiguous prompt with explicit choices: this is my device, this is my child’s device, I don’t know this device, each mapped to the correct data outcome instead of a default merge.
REJECTED: fixing only the tooling. It was the tempting version: visible, fast, purely internal. But a faster mop doesn’t fix a running faucet, and every mistaken merge was a parent locked into someone else’s account.
Execution
The console cut ticket time from thirteen minutes to four. The new login flow routed each choice safely: a child’s device matched to the child’s account where one existed, and otherwise notified the school’s admin that the roster data was wrong, instead of merging a parent into their kid’s identity. Ignored devices were logged, with a monitor that emailed the admin when a single day produced more than fifty, an early warning signal that a school’s sync, not its parents, was the real problem.
Outcome
13 → 4 min
Per unmerge ticket
3 → 1
Internal tools per workflow
50/day
Ignored device threshold that alerts admins
Takeaway
Fix the queue and the faucet. A faster cleanup tool buys time; the real win is upstream, in the flow that creates the mess.