New Restaurant Experience
New restaurant experience - making onboarding a part of empowering customers
I have always been very passionate about first use experiences. It is a cornerstone of any product, as early engagement is directly linked to long term retention. For a new restaurant, joining Deliveroo was convoluted and confusing. Our process was optimised for onboarding Enterprise level partners – but most of our base is small, local restaurants. That means they don’t get dedicated account managers, and having to manage their business and cook, they don’t have the time to understand what was a fairly steep learning curve that left them high and dry at various times.
I focused on improving the experience of small businesses on the online platforms, which virtually are the only touch points this base has with us.
Mind you: if every Local Bronze got 1x more order a week, we’d make ~1.5m a year in extra commission revenue. They also pay the highest commission out of all partners.
To investigate this further, a content designer, a UX researcher and I reached out to form a multidisciplinary team with people across the org. This spanned from commercial, marketing, customer support, legal and experience, and the objective was to tackle the very important (but neglected) onboarding experience. There was a dilapidated understanding of the process in general, since each part of the org only understood onboarding from their unique points of view. Through this, we could establish common needs and challenges for new users in order to inform the strategic vision for new restaurant experience.
Through leading facilitated sessions with the Sales and Customer support teams, I could create a holistic map of the current onboarding experience
It is important to notice that, while important, this work wasn’t officially on the roadmap until I pitched it to leadership, making the case for it and linking it to our OKRs and goals.
With this, I had 3 weeks to produce an MVP. I was able to turn around work that spanned from that to a complete strategy, and informed the communication touch points. This way we could focus on not only speak the same language but to also direct more traffic to our online platform. This includes a guidance module in the home page, but also actionable empty states for all pages.
Have a persistent banner that guides partners through which things to do first to get set up right. These are static at first, and evolve into contextual surfacing – making in-product discovery a real option.
Surface relevant help articles to each one of the components on the data dashboard - integrating that content directly into the platform. Show dummy data instead of the wasteland of zeros they saw before, making it easier to understand what to expect from day 1.
Just because there’s nothing there, doesn’t mean we can’t set their expectations right with actionable empty states
previously, the help centre was outside the product, and the articles felt inane and not necessarily in line with the brand vision
moving to a friendlier version of help articles, now accessible from inside the product itself
What shipped:
Setup wizard stepper
Actionable empty states
Since it’s launch in February 2020, we have seen retention for product raise by 5%, and this early success has fostered discussions for not only the continuation of this project, but bringing into its folds other initiatives, such as automation of processes partners could only do through email – self-serve settings.
What I learned
This gave me the opportunity to propose a new self-serve onboarding flow that reduced the steps from 14 to 6. It directs traffic to the online platform as soon as possible in the journey, creating the one-stop shop for all things restaurant.
