Supporting Local Food Businesses

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 67% of the small business owners lack basic customer analytics.

Our initial aim with Nectar was to support eventually decided to focus on local businesses who were struggling to adapt to sudden changes. At this time in our process, the world was coming to grasp the potential impact the COVID-19 pandemic would have on society, and one of the most vulnerable groups being local businesses. We decided that our solution should give local businesses an edge to be able to compete with larger corporations.

Our Solution

Nectar is a content and data management platform for food businesses that aid in communicating with customers through direct messages and conducting qualitative research through a digital twin of their customer base.

Get direct analysis and personalized tips to improve your business

All incoming messages from customers are collected and organized on Nectars dashboard. Trends are created from recent similar responses so that they can be addressed as quickly as possible. Specific questions that need to be reviewed will directly go to your phone so you can respond to them on the fly.

Get local trends to see what’s best

Business owners will be able to understand what customers in their area would enjoy and implement it towards their own business. They'll have quick and easy access to visualized data from public surveys related to their business to back their business decisions.

Conduct research catered to you

Whether a poll or a survey, Nectar connects it to your chatbot for easy access to customers. You can also add fun facts or memes to create a special connection with them even online. Your results will be organized and visualized for you, so you can easily view what’s on your customer’s minds.

Customer Service made easy

A deliverable I was particularly proud of was our Facebook Messenger chatbot. We decided that the best way to showcase our product was to build out a working chatbot with an existing social media messenger instead of creating a "fake" prototype.

The dialogue responses were made in Dialogflow which has direct integration into Facebook Messenger. I was able to input 19 different intent responses, including an example of our product's chatbot survey. It also includes features such as quick response menus, response shuffling, and dynamic input responses.

Feel free to try to chatbot yourself, linked here!

Research

To fuel all of our insights and design decisions, we started the first five weeks of our project researching the problem we were trying to solve. One problem of the biggest issues we found in our initial research stage which we decided to focus on was that local businesses have a hard time maintaining an online presence and collecting useful customer data. Large corporations are able to do this with ease, however many local business owners don't have the time or the means to focus on this crucial aspect of their business's identity.

From here, we conducted various methods of research in the first five weeks of our project. This included secondary research, surveys, competitor analyses, as well as user interviews with potential customers and food business owners.

Insights

From this research, we found insights such as:

• Customers are only willing to share their data if:
  • It is low-risk public information
  • Customer information has to be shared with privacy guaranteed.
• Customers value relationships between them and the business:
  • Customers enjoy supporting independent businesses.
  • Customers want a mutually beneficial relationship with the business.
• Businesses have specific questions they want customer input on:
  • Businesses want more feedback from customers, including their preferences.
  • Businesses use social media and review sites to track customer satisfaction and connect with our customers.

User Testing

During our many design iterations, we conducted eight user testing interviews during our mid-fidelity and high-fidelity stages. Five of the users were UX Design seniors and three of them were local food business owners based in Savannah, GA. All of our interviews were conducted remotely using Figma's prototyping feature. We also collected both pre-tests and post-tests from the users to gain as much as we could from these interviews.

Appendix

To view our full project, please check out our final presentation. Thanks for reading! 😄