Optimizing User Experience in Smoothie King’s App: A Capstone Consulting Project

Abstract

Smoothie King is currently enhancing its existing app to better cater to customer needs and desires. One of the improvements underway is the ability to shift payment options within the app to pre-loaded funds, aiming to streamline payment management for customers. To help with this task, the company seeks a better understanding of how its customers currently use and engage with the Smoothie King app. This requires an integrative look at the app experience, which includes ordering and payment preferences, primary reasons customers use the app, as well as feedback and suggestions for app improvements. A deeper look into the data and coupling it with the demographic responses was useful in understanding why customers preferred certain ordering and payment options. Smoothie King’s customers' willingness to provide feedback and suggestions for app improvements is invaluable. Our research is timely, as we saw in an article by QSRWeb; it identified restaurant app use rising, but the apps must be intuitive and make it easy to order and pay (QSRWeb, 2021). We found these suggestions to be in alignment with our survey, specifically by the answers to the open-ended questions. Our team has put together extensive research contained within this report. We have selected our top recommendations for Smoothie King to increase customer ordering and use of their Smoothie King app here: • Customers frequently emphasize the need for updates. suggestions have included incorporated the Apple payment option to the app, enabling the option to toggle rewards or discounts directly on the checkout payment screen, and the ability to save multiple payment methods within the app, like other food apps as Uber Eats. • Respondents mentioned throughout the entire survey needed to improvement key areas, which include enhancing navigation for the menu, rewards, and accounts sections; addressing lagging issues inside the app, fix the feature for adding past orders which currently doesn’t not display previous orders, and implementing personalized recommendations based on past purchases. • A large portion of customer feedback within the survey concerned on the incentive and rewards programs. Our recommendation is to consider a more robust and inclusive rewards program. For example, change the birthday smoothie to free for all rewards members, more points for ordering and paying within the app. There is a group of individuals who are not active or inactive. While this population is relatively small, shifting this group of people back to active status would bring the active status user group to approximately 80%. • Customer feedback indicated over half of respondents would be willing to use the preloaded funds payment option if there was more benefit to them. Feedback further indicated incentives to be the top reason they would consider using this payment option. To increase use of the preloaded funds option consider using incentives such as allowing customers to work towards earning a free smoothie. Customers earn a 25% discount for every three smoothies ordered. They can save discounts or use them on any order. Customers would need to purchase twelve smoothies to earn a free one.