Fizz Rewards Program
How might we build loyalty with our top spending customers?
Some Background
Club Soda is a lunch ordering app that delivers straight to a cart inside the customer’s office. Our team wanted to better understand how a loyalty program would affect the customer's lunch ordering habits.
Problem
During interviews, we found customers were not ordering Club Soda because other competitors offered loyalty programs. This included fast casual restaurants, like Sweetgreen and Chipotle as well as online ordering apps, like Ritual and DoorDash.
The Goal
Our goal was to have loyal customers place 1 more order / week on average, and also build brand value so customers would have an emotional connection to our product.
Approach
Over the course of this 2 month project, I ran workshops, generative user interviews, and usability tests on some concept wireframes to help define what a loyalty program would look like for Club Soda.
To begin, our team had a lot of different ideas floating around, so to capture these, I sought to better understand how businesses have approached loyalty programs in the past. From this competitive research, I came across 6 themes.:
1. Point Programs
2. Tiered Loyalty
3. Paid Loyalty
4. Gamification
5. Partnerships
6. Non-monetary Benefits
Our team was able to pick and choose what offerings were best for our product after researching the elements of a loyalty program. I then ran a workshop that sought to align our team on our goals and UX outcomes. I shared lightning demos, and ran affinity mapping exercises to answer 3 main questions:
1. What customer behaviors do we want to encourage? (UX outcome)
2. What do we want customers to gain? (Customer value)
3. How might we encourage Club Soda customer loyalty? (Implementation)
From there, I extrapolated some takeaways and began designing the structure of our loyalty program. Our next steps were to conduct some generative user interviews to understand why customers enjoyed certain loyalty program over others.
The goal with this research was to interview a mix of high-ordering and low-ordering customers, and present 3 program structures of equal value, to see which they prefer. During the interviews, we would ask questions about existing loyalty programs customers enjoyed and identify painpoints to be mindful of.
We had the advantage very tight customer feedback loops, because ezCater employees were also Club Soda customers that we could recruit for interviews.
Our team aligned on 4 themes to incentivize our customers:
- A point system: For incentivization of non-monetary behaviors, such as refering-a-friend
- Redeemable rewards: Credit on meals, gift-cards, or charitable donations
- Gamification: Office leaderboards, badges, and free perks
- Emotional incentives: Hidden achievements, secret menus, & extra points for ordering ahead
Understanding our customers:
We found participants did not quickly perceive the monetary difference between these programs, but expressed concern around the clarity of the earning & redeeming process.
Understanding the business:
Working with data analysts, we modeled how many of our existing customers would have redeemed rewards in the 2 program structures. We found that a "punchcard" redemption structure would result in less redemptions overtime than a points system, but only by a slight margin.
On to wireframes
Once I had a confident understanding of what an MVP would look like, I began wireframing hero-path flows for onboarding, earning points, and redeeming points.
I made wireframes of these 3 flows to validate a few things:
1. The features we initially concepted during our workshop, such as a leaderboard and achievements, were valuable to customers
2. Customers would be able to complete tasks, such as redeeming points
Testing our MVP prototype
Ultimately we had found 4/5 participants would love it if Fizz Rewards rolled out over the next few months, while at the same time 3/5 participants would be content if we did not proceed with it. Additionally we learned:
- Majority participants wanted to be rewarded quickly with a tangible reward. This encouraged creating a tier of redeemable credits valued at $1, $2, $5, $10.
- All participants were skeptical about a leaderboard, some expressing being budget conscious, or embarrassment at the idea of exposing spending habits.
- Majority of participants ultimately favored clarity around earning points and more control over redeeming rewards.
What we landed on
We scoped an MVP to include implementing a tiered points program with frequently redeemable rewards. Earning and redeeming bubbles would be extremely clear in our MVP, and we decided to postpone any socialized features (office leaderboard, achievements, etc.)
Our hopes were that customers would choose ClubSoda over competitors like Sweetgreen, when faced with a decision of what to eat.
Results
At the time of implementing this, GrubHub had announced its Q3 earnings call, which caused our company to focus on strengthening the unit economics, and pause any work related to a loyalty program. Hopefully we'll pick this work up again. I'd like to give the visual design more attention.
If I were to measure the success of this program, I'd monitor a few metrics:
- Rake: measuring the percentage of revenue we secure would help us better understand our unit economics.
- Engagement with the feature would help us gauge the actual interest int this feature (Click-through of How-it-works page, redemption of rewards, etc.)
- NCC’s: Any percentage increase would be a measure of success
- Orders/week in any given office of existing customers
- Customer LTV, would help us understand how this program generated more revenue for high and low volume customers.
Thanks for reading!