What’s your cheese type?
Promoting customer confidence and employee efficiency in cheese ordering
Project Summary
Expanding service offerings for a 100-year-old grocery store
For our service design class, my team worked with Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, a specialty Italian grocery store in Pittsburgh, to expand its current service offerings. The store faces a challenge in engaging new customers and is turned into a cheese museum when first-time, nonexpert visitors come in and leave without any purchase.
We redesigned the cheese ordering experience with the addition of a cheeseboard. The updated cheeseboard equips nonexperts with enough knowledge for stress-free cheese ordering.
Over two months, I drove the project forward by conducting guerrilla research and leading brainstorming and strategic thinking.
Problem
Cheese store turned into ‘cheese museum’
Pennmac locates in the Strip District, a touristy neighborhood with lots of stores and restaurants. On a busy weekend, thousands of visitors walk around the district. The cheese room turns into a cheese museum when people, especially tourists, come into the store and leave without making any purchases.
Our service design addresses this challenge and explores:
How might we engage and capture the lost customers?
Research
What brings returning customers back? I asked PennMac shoppers
I conducted guerrilla research to ask questions about the store and the customers. After talking to five returning customers, many of them have been coming for decades, I found that a key reason people return to PennMac over time.
The secret is the products!
Products link the PennMac shopping experience with personal memory and family traditions.
Shopping at PennMac is not simply an exchange of goods but rather an experience. People come to participate in the tradition, the socializing, and the exploration. However, ultimately the products tie each aspect of the experience together. The products remind people of their experience at PennMac and their participation in the tradition and history. And people add the products and the experience into their family tradition and memory.
Reframed Challenge
Focusing on cheese selling: How might we help people find the cheese they purchase only at PennMac?
If we can guide people to their first purchase, we are making a big step towards converting first-timers into loyal customers. Our mission, therefore, has turned into helping customers find the products that they would purchase.
Persona Construction
The nonexperts are the lost customers
I followed three groups of shoppers around the store and found a pattern–people who are unfamiliar with cheese are not comfortable getting in line. My team created the non-expert persona to guide our design process.
The customer loss is made worse by staff shortage. Employees do not have the time and energy to educate each customer during busy hours, so we decided to use installation to reduce pressure for the customers and the cheesemongers.
Solution
Cheeseboard guides customers through cheese ordering
We propose a cheeseboard that invites customers to participate in the store activity and to engage with the board to find cheese recommendations based on their preferences. With some ideas and inspirations from the board, customers feel more comfortable getting in line and ordering some cheese.
Value Added
Increased customer confidence and employee efficiency
My team presented the service proposal to Pat and Adam–senior employees at PennMac and received positive feedback.
After hearing our proposal, Pat said “That’s what we gotta grab... the new customers' first step.”
Reflection
The service is for the customers as much as it is for the client: Converting a digital solution to a physical one
I learned the importance of learning about both the customers and the client. Our team originally came up with a digital solution—a website that provides recommendations and ideas for product pairing. But PennMac was a more old-fashioned organization, and the employees prefer pen & paper. We decided to accustom to the client’s behavior and not propose another digital application.