| Service Design Lead | Business and Value Model | CX
BitesCo is a start up that customises vending machines to match the spaces that they inhabit and the inside with interesting snacks tailored to the community that they serve.
The Brief
To understand the types of users that are visiting the website, their needs and behaviours and recommend how the product can be made more appealing to them
To recommend ways that current business processes can be streamlined so that they can prepare to scale.
Research
| 8 Face to Face Interviews
| 10 Contextual Enquiries
| 1 founder workshop
Insights
Our research uncovered two different personas with varying needs; one focused more on productivity and health for a closed user group and one with an evolving clientele more interested in engaging the community and providing a focal point.
These personas allowed us to frame the rest of the work, including a workshop that I lead with one of the founders and the rest of the team to take us through 'the backstage' operations of her business.
Insight 02
Insight 01
The founders spend a lot of time onsite/out of the office and sometimes visit prospects up to 4 times.
Efficiencies will need to be found if the business is to scale.
Insight 03
The customer intepretation of the value proposition doesn't match what the founders think it is.
Insight 04
The stakeholder map can be complex making it difficult to for both stakeholders and the founders to interact and sell
How might we help customers understand the true value of BitesCo, so that we can streamline the sales process to enable faster client conversion and prepare the business for scale
Creating Value
Current State
Interviews with users and had suggested there were other reasons they were buying into the current BitesCo value proposition that weren’t articulated in their current value proposition. In mapping the current value proposition we were able to explore what other pain relievers and gain creators existed.
Creating the Future
Research and ideation suggested that while the personalisation of the product and ability to customise its content where important, the value (cost) and appreciating & understanding the founders work and journey to bring the product to market formed part of the decision process.
Testing & Executing
With these insights in mind we wired-framed some new artifacts for the website and tested these. The response was positive with users being able to remember and articulate the new value in 40 seconds.
“The personalisation service is free. You can customize the machine and the snacks selection you want to offer, they’ve obviously spent a lot of time to do this”
Ideating for Scale
Understanding back of house operations
From the brief and an initial consultation with the founders we knew that they put a lot into the business and also spent a lot of time dealing with leads, sometimes going in and out of their offices 3-4 times to collate information once a deal had been won.
I ran a workshop with the owners to help the team understand what the back of house operations and touchpoints look like. This helped visualise the customer journey and explore the painpoints for the founders
Insight: We realised that for the business to scale they would need to find efficiencies to remove them for high touch areas of the business.
Building for scale
From here I built a blueprint that was updated throughout the course of the project allowing us to see where our ideas and artifacts played a part in the customer journey and what paintpoints they were solving. As ideas evolved or were iterated, we could always refer back to the blueprint to ensure we knew what problem we were solving.
This artifact was also a finished piece for the founders to understand what data requirements, system tools and changes would be needed for them to scale; it helped us to find and articulate where we could find efficiencies to remove them from the day to day.
Providing the tools to step back
Understand the value
One of the foundations of the new value propostion was to tell the story of the founding of the business. In a whirl of post it notes we came up with the idea of telling the founders’ story through a journey to highlight how they travelled and upskilled to create their unique business.
Try the value
Feedback from the research had told us that customers loved the tasting sessions that the founders had run and served as both a lead generation and engagement exercise. We quickly prototyoped a paper tasting kit that could be sent to and used by leads for internal discussions
Augment the value
Personalisation is a big theme for BitesCo. In ideating how we could provide better sales & marketing tools and create better opportunities through more engaged leads, we came up with the concept of an AR vending machine app. The app allows anyone to personalise a BitesCo vending machine and see it in situ.
Summary
The three tools above have given the founders different, remote ways of selling their unique proposition that allow them to focus their time on growth. The service design work has allowed them to understand what processess and tools they could use to streamline and automate their business.
The beauty of the project was Service Design and UX working together seemlessly to deliver great business outcomes.
Project Team
Robert Leaver - Service & CX Design
Michael Kang - UX & 3D Design
Danny Unitt - UX & UI Design
Yuki Horinka - UX & UI Design