Elevating the customer
experience at Foxtrot

tldr:

My ID team partnered with Foxtrot, a high-end convenience grocery/cafe and delivery service, to create innovative customer experience opportunities for both regular and new customers.

With worthy competitors in the field, Foxtrot's goal is to stand-out with their "obsession worthy food", staying true to their brand, and creating a seamless experience in store and on their app.

Design Process

Foxtrot Innovation Goals:
Future of Shopping
Future of Hospitality
Create Cross-channel Customers

On-site observation, spatial-temporal mapping, customer intercepts

Journey mapping, three rounds of opportunity space iteration

Concept and hypothesis generation

Quantitative testing, customer intercepts, staff interviews

Final Concept:
Self Serve Drink Station

The idea for a self-serve drink station was inspired by self serve breweries, and operates under the hypothesis that the ability for customers to serve themselves basic drink orders would decrease their wait time and ease the burden of order fulfillment on the Foxtrot employees.

My main takeaways

Focus on the goal, don't get caught in the weeds
Don't force a concept to work. Reframe the problem and try again
Test parameters must be a compromise of designer needs and company capabilities

Final concept Self Serve station

The Story

This project was the first time I was able to work for a real client and be able to go through the design process from the ground up, and it really taught me a lot about how important it is to approach service innovation from a human centered lens.

Observation and Research Phase

Foxtrot wants to be the best in the convenience grocery/cafe space, and in order for us to help them reach their goals, we not only had to understand the opportunity space and the true essence of Foxtrot as a company, but how their customers viewed Foxtrot and how Foxtrot fit into their identities and lives.

We started off with our research phase. Along with doing market, competitor, and analogous research...

I drew spatial-temporal maps of customer interactions at different Foxtrot locations. This technique really helped me trace exactly where customers were spending the most time in the store, and figure out how the store was most utilized. The most common trajectories were people coming in to pick up online orders and leaving right away, or people ordering at the counter, and either taking a lap around the store while they waited or standing on their phones to the side.

I performed intercepts and interviews with customers enjoying different aspects of the store. Getting raw customer reactions is critical to understanding how they think, and I was surprised at how many people appreciated the opportunity to share what would make their Foxtrot experience even better for them.
I also interviewed a manager and staff from different locations as well so that I could understand their point of view of how Foxtrot runs and how they ensure a positive customer experience.

Since Foxtrot is very brand forward and focuses a lot on crafting a unique vibe for their stores, I went to Instagram to examine the kind of people that tagged Foxtrot in their posts and the theme of their content. I found Foxtrot is definitely a destination for influencers looking for a chic cafe, and that people posted a lot about their excitement of seeing their favorite local product being sold at a Foxtrot store.

Defining the Audience

My team members and I input and organized all of our observations, customers quotes, and other research into an excel data map, and from there, we started trying to make sense of it all.

A big idea that kept surfacing was *routine*, and we also found that the majority of the customers visiting the locations were millennials who live very nearby and visit weekly (many daily). We decided to focus our sites on creating experiences for that local audience who includes Foxtrot as a special part of their life routine, especially the ones who are Foxtrot "Perks" app rewards members.

Audience =
Loyal to Foxtrot routine

Takeaway #1:
Focus on the goal, don't get caught in the weeds.

Approaching the Customer Service Issues

The part of the synthesis we were all most eager to do, however, was to define opportunities for improving customer experience at the stores. We all noticed some inefficiencies through our observations:

Staff too busy filling mobile orders and getting behind on in-person orders
Customers not knowing where to wait for their drinks
Customer shopping being disrupted by the constant back and forth of staff restocking and filling grocery orders

I definitely was motivated enough to not only solve all the customer service issues, but I wanted to make work easier for the staff as well!

This is where my first takeaway comes in: Focus on the goal, don't get caught in the weeds. We wanted to re-design staff and back-end operations, but that was not in the scope of the project, and would also require company-wide restructuring. We narrowed the focus to finding ways to elevate the Foxtrot customer service in ways that we had more control over.

"Orchestrating the In-Between" Moments

After many rounds of ideation, my team decided to go with the opportunity area of Orchestrating the In-Between Moments. We noticed that the moments in-between customers placing an order and receiving the order, as well as the moments between picking out an item and purchasing it, could be sources of confusion or frustration for customers, with long wait times and baristas being busy with orders from "invisible" online customers.

We tried creating service concepts that would engage customers during these in-between moments. We also knew that the Foxtrot customers identified with the brand, and were going to Foxtrot specifically for the atmosphere and the high-quality products. We wanted to use this opportunity to help customers connect to the Foxtrot staff and the local food providers who sold goods in the store.

Takeaway #2:
Don't force a concept to work. Reframe the problem, and try again.

These ideas sounded great! However, after many rounds of iteration on these ideas, I had a sinking feeling that this was approach was not the way to go.

This is where my second takeaway comes in: Don't try to force a concept to work, even if you worked really hard on it. Reframe the problem, and try again. We were designing under the assumption that customers wanted to be engaged during their wait time, however, after running these concepts by potential customers, they all said that the ideas "would be nice", but they usually just scroll on their phone while waiting and might not go out of their way to participate in the services.

Reframing the Problem

When I looked at the problem again, I had a revelation. We were designing bandaids for customers to deal with the wait time, when really we should be trying to eliminate the wait time altogether. But since we were not touching staff operations, we had to come up with a way for customers to decrease wait time themselves.

This brought about our final concept: Self-Serve Simple Drink Station. Many customers came into the store and ordered basic drinks, such as black coffee, cold brew, or a prepared late on tap. Inspired by the pay-by-the-ounce taps at breweries, our idea was that customers could fill (and refill) provided cups or their own mugs with simple drinks, and their Perks app would charge them by the ounce and keep track of their tab.

Our hypothesis for this concept was that the ability for customers to serve themselves basic drink orders would decrease their wait time and ease the burden of order fulfillment on the Foxtrot employees.

The concept would not only increase the customer use of the app, but it would give the customer a greater sense of freedom to choose how they wanted to experience Foxtrot.

Self-serve Drink Station

Takeaway #3:
Test parameters must be a compromise of designer needs and company capabilities

Prototyping and Testing

Now that we settled on a concept (and it was of interest to our Foxtrot partners), it was now time to test it.

We knew that it would not be practical (or in the budget or time constraints) to prototype a fully functioning machine without knowing if people would want to use it, so we decided that our first test would be to evaluate whether customers would be willing to serve themselves black coffee rather than waiting for the barista to prepare the drink behind the counter.

This, however, led to my final takeaway: The parameters of a prototype test must be a compromise of what the designer wants to do, and what the company is able and willing to do. Unfortunately, due to food safety and time constraints, Foxtrot was not able to set up a station where customers could serve themselves coffee.

We were discouraged by this news, but we decided to take one more step back and design a test that would simply gauge overall customer interest in the idea of a self-serve station.

To inform customers about our idea, we hung copies of this poster in a specific Foxtrot store location.

As customers ordered and were waiting, the baristas directed their attention to the posters so they could understand our concept.

My team and I next asked customers to privately place a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" token into a box to share whether they would actually use the station or not. If the customers were willing, we would ask them follow up questions to gather feedback about the concept.

We also interviewed the Foxtrot staff to learn their thoughts about the idea, and what would need to happen for the concept to work.

Overall, the quantitative results were positive! The majority of test participants said that they would use the self-serve station

Key Insights

After reviewing the customer intercept notes and the staff interviews, we developed these key insights from this first round of testing:

The target audience for this concept is:

Local “Perks” customers who have Foxtrot as part of their routine
In-person, millennial aged, “Perks” customers who order simple drinks and are short on time

Customers appreciate the ability to skip the line and decrease their wait time, but only if they know it will be the same Foxtrot quality and that they can fix their drink the way they like it
The staff value the future potential for the idea, but acknowledge that it will require a lot of planning and foresight to make sure the idea actually decreases the workload instead of increasing it

My team would have loved to have iterated on this idea further and done more in-depth testing, but since the project timeline had come to a close, we ending by giving Foxtrot our final proposal with our concept explanation, final results/ insights, a service blueprint for our concept, and future thinking ideas for Foxtrot to consider if they moved forward with this concept. See proposal document in the tldr section

I learned an incredible amount from doing this project, and it really helped me understand for the first time how powerful the design process can be. I was amazed at just how many ideas and opportunity spaces my team could create from the numerous rounds of iteration, and watching our concept slowly get molded from one starting point to the next was an awesome experience. I look forward to helping more companies and organizations achieve their full potential by using the skills I learned from this project!

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Elevating the customer experience at Foxtrot