The confidential information in this case study has been altered
Background
During 2014 in Taiwan, brands in the service industry mostly engaged in digital marketing via a customized app, which required the high cost of app iteration from the brands and the download motivation from the customers. However, the customers may just delete the app after redeeming the reward.
Therefore, this company developed an interactive marketing platform with no need to download any apps. The company used phone numbers to register new customer accounts, and aimed for providing a whole new solution for all sizes of chain brands in the service industry.
When I joined the team, they had a cheerful performance at running loyalty cards on the platform across more than 200 stores in Taiwan. Their next step was targeting the 40 billion NTD business of the coupons market.
Role
My role was to design this brand-new interactive marketing functionality for the coupons, and facilitated communication between a product manager and developers. My responsibility was across business and user research, user interface and experience design, and the further iteration, including:
1. Explored the coupon business and user behavior during check-out 2. Analyzed and organized the requirements, and defined the problems 3. Conducted the user interviews and summarized the persona 4. Set up the user flow and business context chart through workshop 5. Created the low-fidelity wireframe and prototype for usability testing 6. Set up the UI guideline and RWD specification for the mobile devices 7. Launched the on-site survey to follow up the result and collect the insights
Challenge
“ Marketing at the counter was usually intense, the staff and customers were both under pressure to check-out quicker ”
In Taiwan, people generally try not to inconvenience others. Therefore, it was intense that each check-out time had only 30–60 seconds on average. The new Interactive Coupon would be built on the top of this context.
My high-level mission: 1. Explored and defined the business context of all marketing coupons 2. Expanded the marketing possibilities for the brands in the service industry 3. Refined the UX of new functionality to adapt to intense check-out process
Requirement
The customer analysis of one of our clients (Left) & The global uninstall rate of the APPs (Right)
The insights from Brand’s perspective
Digital coupons were not yet common in Taiwan then, most brands relied on paper coupons for marketing. From our data pool, we learned that the business contribution of regular customers was 2.7 times of the new ones.
We launched a survey across different types of service brands among our clients, such as restaurants, beverages, retails, clothing, hair salons, fitness, hotels, rental vehicles, and medical care. Their common feedback was:
1. No ideal solution in the market The cost of customized apps was high, so as the paper coupons from manpower. Also, the uninstall rate of an app would reach 38% within 24 hours after it was downloaded. 2. Increasing the retention rate of customers Our clients would like to expand their new customers via coupon sharing and increase the retention rate of regular customers through the adding-value gift card. 3. Making the decision based on the data As the paper coupons were difficult to evaluate the performance, our clients would like to digitize their coupons to collect the customer data and summarize the profiles.
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Conducted a workshop to organize the insights with teammates by the post-it notes
The insights from customer’s perspective
From the interview, I learned that most coupon users are thrifty and loyal customers who have the habit of organizing group-buying among friends. Therefore, their friends could be the potential customers to our clients.
1. Untraceable profit split of coupons In the same brands, the coupons from direct-selling stores may not allow being redeemed in franchised stores due to the forgery of high-value coupons or untraceable profit split. 2. The inconvenience of paper coupons The paper coupons might take up the space in the wallets or purses. It was inconvenient for most customers to find the right coupons during the check-out. 3. Unfriendly experience of the customized apps The customers tended to not download the brand’s customized app for any one-time redeem. Also, It couldn’t be reversed when the redeem button was accidentally pressed.
Research & Insight
The ultimate summary of the business contexts
The current coupon business
In order to analyze the campaigns and targets of coupons, I collected all types of marketing coupons and learned that the campaigns were mostly focused on pre-selling commodity & service or later-redeeming discount & gift.
1. Discount It was often applied by the retails and clothing targeting for increasing the return rate of new and regular customers. Therefore, the applicable conditions could be diverse. 2. Gift & Freebie It was highly popular among the large-size chain brands, applied by the enterprises to provide the festival or yearly award for their employees. This was the most profitable type with 40 billion NTD business. 3. Commodity & Service It was mostly applied by the restaurants, fitness, and hair salons by pre-selling a set of services or commodities to keep the return rate of their regular customers.
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The user journey of different roles in different brands during the check-out process
Users Journey in Check-out
The Restaurant & Beverage brands are well known for coupon marketing. Through a workshop, we created the user journey from multiple on-site surveys that was focused on the time and user behavior in each step.
1. Campaign Participation Two scenarios after the check-out, one was the customers left immediately, they may miss out on potential campaigns(Low), another one was the customers waiting for their take-out or receiving the service in a queue, which was the entry for the campaigns(High). 2. Campaign Engagement 80% of customers were willing to have the higher discount by signing in the membership or filling in their personal information for further benefits. Also, 35% of customers returned to the same store within 1 week to 1 month. 3. Marketing Touchpoint There were 2 touchpoint, one was the staff proactively invited the customers, another one was the customers noticed the campaigns through banners or table stands. The major workflow could be summarized as Acquire & Redeem the coupons. 4. Marketing Time There were 2 lengths of marketing time, the beverage & restaurant brands had the shortest time for the campaigns, because of the high volume of customer flow. On the contrary, the hair salon, fitness, and medical care brands had the longest time during the service receiving.
Current Situation
Sharelike’s current model — Phone numbers as customer accounts (left), Interactive tablet on the counter & the NFC stamp for redeem verification (middle), SMS as receipt carriers (Right)
As the current model for interactive marketing on this platform, to receive & redeem the points on the loyalty card was relatively simple compared to the coupons, so as the receipts. Therefore, I defined the challenges:
1. Coupon Context 1.1. Based on the redeemable items, the coupon campaign could be flexible and diverse across different types of brands. 1.2. The redeemable items in a campaign were mostly multiple, and each item had their own amount to manage. 2. Customer Platform 2.1. The cost of using SMS as the receipts could be unpredictably expensive because of the large amount of coupon information. 2.2. Regarding the group buying, the coupon sharing for gaining new customers who were unregistered members may rely on the SMS.
Execution
“ This is a brand-new model, we may be considered as a pioneer in the market. “
The persona of customers in the restaurant and beverage brands summarized from our data pool and interview
The functionality of coupon — TICK
I pulled out the data, combined the insights of the customer’s views on coupon marketing and buying habits. The customers could be categorized into strict type (10%), planning type (60%), and spontaneous type (30%).
To validate this new functionality as fast as possible, my goal at the early stage was to run the 3 months of trial run with our clients’ campaigns and collect feedback from their customers.
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1. User Testing
The team named this new functionality as TICK, inspired by its major action of checking the coupons on tablets.
In most of the scenarios, the tablets would be facing the customers and the staff may only provide the support. Therefore, the UI should be intuitive enough in reducing confusion to the customers of any age.
Minimized Information The customers only focused on the coupon name & amount, other information was more irrelevant to them, such as description, serial number, or expiration date. As a result, It was against our early assumption that the customers may surf the coupons on tablets. Precise Terminology Acquire & Redeem were the 2 main contexts in TICK. However, Acquire may suggest that the coupons were always free, and Redeem was understandable only when users were aware of their available coupons in the accounts. I altered the terms into Coupon Menu & My Coupons afterward. Fastest Workflow The range of coupons amount could be diverse in different types of campaigns. The single-tap to add or remove 1 coupon couldn’t well support the buy-in of 10–30 coupons at once in the beverage brands. Therefore, I also provided the keyboard for the faster input.
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2. Trial Run
We choose the restaurant, beverage, hair salon, and medical care brands for the trial run of TICK
After the user testing, TICK was immediately brought into the development. We launched its Proof of Concept for 3 months of trial run in the restaurant, beverage, hair salon, and medical care brands among our clients.
Distinguishable Contexts As knowing the turnover rate of staff was high in most of the service brands, the training time for the staff on campaigns was mostly short. In order to largely reduce the effort for UI learning and make the best use of trail run, I decided to change the tabs color of My Coupon from red to green.
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3. Context Reflection
The product manager and I launched the second survey on the TICK in check-out
Regarding the paper coupons, the staff may just hand over a single coupon, a set of coupons, or document the pre-purchased items on receipt for further redeeming. As well as the customers in handing over back at next return.
Digital coupons boost the marketing decisions by data collection on the brand’s side. However, we yet brought back the advantage of paper coupons to the staff and customers. In the second survey on TICK, we learned:
Staff were the Main Users Generally, the regular customers had items on their mind that they want to redeem before entering the stores. On the TICK, they would only input the phone number and inform the staff. Therefore, the staff would go through selecting the redeeming items and amount, verifying the redeeming with NFC stamp, logging out the accounts for each customer. Redeeming coupons was most common In contrast to loyalty cards, our data in 3 months of trial run showed that the count on coupon redeeming to the coupon acquiring was 10 to 1 in most of the restaurant and beverage brands. Their long-term campaign of buying 10 at once for a higher discount suggested that we could provide a new structure of navigation. Password wasn’t always required In our early assumption of passwords, we believed that how much the customers value the security was mostly based on the value of their coupons. However, we noticed that a luxury clothing brand had a password sheet for all their regular customers, who were used to having a trusting relationship with the staff.
Fixed Set (Left), Large Set (Middle), and Speedy Set (Right)
I aimed for reducing the effort from the staff by specifying the 3 types of major campaigns across all the brands.
1. Specified Contexts Fixed Set for the same campaign in long-term, Large Set for the commodities & service coupons, and the Speedy Set for discount. 2. Prioritized Action Displaying customer’s coupons as home page, popping up the coupon menu and acquiring action only when it was required. 3. Switchable Password On the backend panel, passwords was switchable for the campaigns. Also, users could skip it if no coupons were added or used.
The feature of Group Buying — Sharelink
“ Targeting for group buying from regular customers, giving a boost to brands’ viral marketing. ”
With TICK as the foundation, we therefore built a coupon sharing feature as website on the mobile to support the lucrative group buying. The workflow was simple and the customers won’t be under pressure as operating it.
1. Group Buying Targeting the campaigns of group buying for the low unit-price and high purchased-amount items in restaurant and beverage brands. 2. Receipt Carrier On the customers side, this feature also provided a carrier for the large information of coupon receipt.
Creating the RWD specification on mobile and tablet device for the developers
Leap Upgrade
The functionality of POS Integration — JPOS
“ Is it possible for customers to receive loyal points & coupons through staff’s action on POS registers? “
After the trial run, our sale agents noticed that the staff in large-size chain brands may skip the campaign during the massive volume of customer flow. Therefore, a new challenge emerged:
1. Staff Workflow — Could staff’s effort on campaign be largely reduced? 2. Reward Mapping — How do we auto-match the rewards to its owners?
Regarding the staff training, in contrast to campaign, we learned that the POS register training was the standard procedure. A question was raised as could the staff remotely operate the campaign on the register during check-out?
New Idea 1. The data integration between the POS registers and our platform 2. The automatic convert from spending amount to campaign reward 3. The claim of campaign reward would be optional to the customers Insights reflection 1. Waiting time for takeout was 45–120s for beverage, 5–10m for restaurant 2. Regular customers rarely missed out on any campaign and reward 3. The non-claimed reward could be viewed as free-to-claim or invalid items
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After the check-out, we saw that the staff would guide the customers to the waiting zone for their takeout and inform them of the campaigns. Therefore, placing the tablets in front of the waiting customers could spare further effort from the staff. The left challenge to be solved was Reward Mapping:
The interaction specification for mapping the customers and their reward.
Three reward cards at most The mapping structure may grow larger and more complex as the number of reward cards we preserved for the customers. Therefore, JPOS would only preserve the most recent 3 reward cards on the tablets.Optional claim on the rewards As the beverage wait was 45 second on average, it gave 2 minutes for the first customer to claim their rewards before check-out of the forth customers. Also, the staff could delete the cards if customers declined the rewards.Mapping mechanism of the reward cards The automation for the reward cards to move, the most recent cards would be the center of tablets by default, and the latter cards would be automatically moved to the center when the previous one was claimed.Staff panel for the reward records A lightweight staff panel on the tablets for any slight adjustment on the reward mapping, such as the customers asking for claiming the missed rewards or the staff required to correct the claimed record.
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Execution
We combined the loyalty cards and coupons on this overall marketing solution. In order to provide this scalable platform the design consistency for any extension. Therefore, I set up a few guideline for the further feature:
1. Sitemap 2. Flowchart 3. UI Guideline 4. RWD Specification
The documents for developers & the guideline for future designs
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On the Console Platform, users could configure the campaign of loyalty, coupons, and scratch cards, manage the customer profiles, analyze the collected data, and set up brand’s visual identification elements on the tablets.
UI on tablet (Top) & UI on desktop (Bottom)
The early trial run for the loyalty cards
Impact
JPOS
The restaurant, beverage, hair salon, fitness, and the medical care brands became the long-term clients of JPOS. During the high customer flow, they would place the 2 tablets, one for the redeeming near to the register, another one for the acquiring in the customer waiting zone.
TICK
On the other hand, one of our clients signed up for a 3 year of contract with TICK after the trial run, thanks to the specified contexts on the workflow. TICK became their long-term partner in marketing.
The regular customers increased by 300% and the yearly business grew by 40% at most in a single store.
Sharelink
The Sharelink was the favorite feature among beverage and restaurant brands, the most loyal clients continuing to run the group buying for 2 years.
With no further instruction, 35% of the customers in age of 18 to 66 could start the group buying on their own.
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