Industry First:
Food & Drink at 120mph
Summary
With a change of franchise, new management came in with a new set of directives; to increase catering revenue onboard. They had identified a draft solution, a trolley tracker web portal; however this was contrary to the existing customer and employee insight.
James carried out some validatory research and demonstrated the value of evolving the solution to be more user orientated by designing an at seat Food & Drink delivery system.
After 6 weeks of design and build, we launched the UK’s first onboard at seat food and drink delivery website as a proof of concept, doubling onboard revenue, enhancing customer and employee satisfaction and leading to the full rollout across all services (+20 million customer journeys a year).
Stats
PROBLEM
Commercially, the business needed more ancillary revenue through catering. In addition, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction had fallen due to existing solutions
SOLUTION
Designed and launched the UK’s first at seat food & drink delivery system
BUSINESS RESULT
Revenue: +100% incremental revenue
PEOPLE RESULT
Customer Satisfaction: +95%
Employee Satisfaction: +93%
Discover
The real ask from the client was not about introducing a trolley tracker, but increasing ancillary revenue. With this in mind, we reviewed the existing research and uncovered key insights such as:
The seat was king: customers did not want to get out of their seats during their journey
Customer expectations are fluid: passengers expected a digital service akin to an Amazon Prime or Deliveroo / Just Eat / Door Dash
The trolley: staff hated pushing the trolley, given its limited range, lack of refrigeration and weight making it cumbersome and difficult to use (especially during disruption)
Food & drink generally: despite there being an onboard Shop and trolley, customers were either unaware of them or did not encounter them regularly. Customers wanted to buy food & drink, but didn’t know how
James carried out some additional research, sending out surveys to customers and staff to validate the existing research. Then, he structured the research into a journey map, helping to identify key threats and opportunities in the current experience. The feedback emphasized the points above, and enabled us to begin discovering potential solutions.
Design
For the solutions, we carried out 3 x divergence workshops with customers and staff. The purpose was to identify as many possible solutions as possible, following the Double Diamond approach of Divergence. We did this through Crazy 8s, helping us to create at least 50 x potential solutions to the existing user challenges encountered on board.
After having conducted the workshops, as a project team we then started to Converge, meaning we began stripping out potential solutions which were out of scope (i.e. budget and time) or did not match user expectations.
We then applied the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility framework, with key stakeholders scoring potential proposals according to their expertise and the available insight.
This was when it became clear that the solution was an at seat food & drink website which would enable customers to order food & drink without leaving their seats.
We then conducted one more workshop where we fleshed out the food & drink proposition, using Storyboarding and Storymapping to help keep a clear user centred vision and prioritize the roadmap vs backlog (MoSCoW framework).
When we presented the concept to management, they approved the change of solution and provided their full support in beginning the Proof of Concept as soon as possible
Deliver
I then took all the existing assets and run another project workshop, this time also including customers to ensure their voice was heard throughout. In the workshop we conducted bodystorming (mock rehearsals) as well as more Divergence activities, rapidly ideating potential designs via Crazy 8 sketching and amalgamating the best bits into an initial wireframe.
This had to be conducted for the customer facing portal but also the staff portal. As a result, we also carried out an employee workshop to help identify what their ideal system would look like and prioritizing key features they felt would be crucial (e.g. the ability to freeze the service during disruption or times of high customer traffic).
Following this, we began converting the assets into high fidelity wireframes which centred around as few screens as possible, being:
Entry Screen (confirm your train journey, carriage and seat number)
Menu Screen (user can browse any product and add to their cart)
Cart Screen (user can review all items added to their cart)
Checkout flow (this was white label but had to contain specific customization e.g. ability to pay in cash)
At this stage, we were confident that our process had uncovered the best possible solution given the circumstances and project scope. As a result, we worked with the development team, refining elements of the design which may prove technically restrictive at this stage, and moved a few more items to the backlog for future releases
Conclusion
Following build and some final QA (remote and in person on a train), we launched 6 weeks from inception of the project. After only 4 weeks, management greenlit the full rollout given the immense commercial and user success of the project
+100% incremental revenue onboard
+95% customer and +93% employee satisfaction scores achieved