BACKGROUND
Setting the stage
The Business Center is our existing web solution that contains 3 tiers — Free+, Basic, and Premium.
Just as the new Starter (see Starter case study) product tier is meant to replace Free+, we aim to replace Basic with the new Pro product tier.
THE PROBLEMS
Identifying the pain points
The pain-points we aim to rectify with the new Pro product are as follows:
01. Legacy code — The BC is built on a legacy code base making it difficult to improve, as any adjustments to the product took intensive implementation effort.
02. Limited devices — The current BC is not responsive, so it can only be used on on desktop.
03. Complex usability — The bulk of our support requests come from BC users who don't understand how to complete certain actions, like adjusting their availability.
04. High acquisition costs — Restaurants must be registered and onboarded to the BC manually by our internal support team, which takes a bit of time and effort.
DEFINING
Understanding the competition
We had a good idea of the feature set we’d need to include for first release by analyzing most frequently used features in BC - Basic and referencing existing research from this segment of the market.
To get a better understanding of other simplistic reservation management systems out there, I conducted a competitive analysis.
I compared aspects such as:
How they market themselves
Their packages and pricing models
Platforms
Available feature sets
I also took a more granular look at their flows in an attempt to gauge overall usability and intuitiveness.
EMPATHIZING
Understanding the job
Once we had finalized our feature set for the first release I created job stories to ensure the team was aligned on the overall value and intention behind these features. This provided us with something to anchor our design and development tasks to.
IF YOU'VE LANDED ON THIS CASE STUDY FIRST...
The Pro product tier uses aspects of Starter and Host App as a base. Similarly, this tool contains the basic reservation system components such as the reservation list, and the creation of reservations and walk-ins. Please refer to those case studies to reference these basic feature sets, or watch the video below (created by our talented Marketing team)!
What sets Pro apart is it's addition of integral settings that give the restaurant full ownership over their online presence and reservation management controls.
VALUE 01
Reservations on your terms
Restaurants have their own unique process when it comes to scheduling, planning, and handling large group sizes. Pro provides the ability to define when reservations can be accepted, the max group size, and how much time in advance is necessary to appropriately plan the shift.
Additionally, by estimating how long guests will occupy a table, this helps the system to be smarter with automatic table assignments.
VALUE 02
Easily adjust capacity
Things may change in the restaurant on any given day. Perhaps more tables are added once the weather is nice enough to sit outside, or capacity needs to (unfortunately) be limited due to COVID-19. Regardless of the scenario, the capacity section allows the restaurant to make sure areas and tables logged into the system are accurate and up to date.
Designs by Kostas Dimotstantos
VALUE 03
Entice guests
Traditionally, the restaurant profiles on Quandoo's diner-facing website are managed by our internal support teams. With Pro the restaurants are in full control to define aspects like cuisine type, photos, menus, and more.
VALUE 04
Simple set-up
Sign-up is the easy. By simply searching for a restaurant on Quandoo's b2b website, a business can be "claimed" after a quick authentication process. Once registered, we provide guidance to set-up all necessary settings in order to list the restaurant online and start receiving reservations
Designs by Kaili Cheng
THE LAUNCH
A unified approach
Once we reached code complete for first version, the team decided to do an internal release prior to the official external release.
The internal release, run by our UX Researcher, allowed everyone in the company to try out the tool by following specific prompts. They then answered a survey to help us gague overall ease of use, value, and aesthetics.
This helped us to identify bugs we needed to fix prior to release, and also provided some ideas to add to our backlog.
We then launched the product to the public in September 2021.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
Learning and planning
Now that Pro has been released, we're gathering data on overall performance and planning our next steps.
Data dashboards are still being constructed, but what we know so far is:
29 restaurants have signed up (mostly through sales rather than self-sign up)
Daily average reservation per merchant is around 3 Quandoo-generated reservations, and 5 manually logged into the system by the restaurant
A few things we're looking into:
Why might self-service sign up be failing?
Do we need to rethink our marketing efforts? Are restaurants simply more comfortable working with a support representative than signing up to a tool on their own?
What other features do restaurants expect in a mid-level type product?
The Supply team is in the process of doing an extensive competitive analysis, as well as gathering all insights from their associated markets to give us an indication on what limits us from making more sales.