Reducing churn
Merqueo is a leading platform for grocery and home essentials delivery, leveraging its proprietary dark-store network and supply chain infrastructure. With a catalog ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 products, customers can shop for everything from fresh produce, imported goods, and liquor to household supplies, personal care items, and packaged foods. To date, Merqueo has successfully secured $88 million in venture capital funding, fueling its rapid growth and market expansion.
Date
September 2019
Company
Merqueo
Team
PDs, EM and PM
Role
Product Designer
Platform
Android
The problem
The biggest challenge for the grocery delivery industry is customer churn. Lasting behavior change is only possible if the new experience is flawless and significantly bette, ideally 10x better than the traditional way customers shop for groceries. A single negative experience, such as missing items in an order, forces customers to either visit a physical store or place another order, leading to frustration and decreased loyalty. Consistently failing to deliver a complete order drives customers away, ultimately resulting in high churn rates.
Discovery
At Merqueo’s scale at the time, product tracking in warehouses was managed manually using spreadsheets edited by warehouse staff. These spreadsheets, combined with supplier orders, determined the availability of products displayed on the consumer app. However, this approach resulted in inaccurate stock levels being shown, leading to customers adding items to their cart that were, in reality, out of stock. This discrepancy frequently resulted in incomplete orders, driving customer dissatisfaction. To understand this at detail we traced the journey of a product from its arrival to warehouse until is on customer's hands.
Define
Early on, we realized that achieving accurate stock levels required streamlining the movement of products within our warehouses and making this process intuitive for our staff. To address this, we needed to develop a solution that would not only simplify warehouse operations but also empower our teams to track inventory more effectively.
However, scalability was a key priority, as the company aimed to expand operations into new countries where we would likely encounter similar challenges. This drove us to design set of systems that could be easily adapted to different markets, ensuring consistency and efficiency across all locations.
Our primary users for this project the warehouse staff had specific requirements that we needed to address:
Device Compatibility: They rely on Honeywell Android devices equipped with barcode scanners, so the solution needed to seamlessly integrate with these devices.
Glove Compatibility: Given that they wear gloves throughout their shifts, the interface had to be optimized for touch inputs that work reliably with gloves on, ensuring ease of use without removing them.
Battery Efficiency: To maximize productivity, the application needed to be highly optimized for minimal battery consumption, allowing the staff to complete an entire shift on a single charge. This required a focus on efficient code, reduced background processes, and battery-friendly design choices.
Develop
While the rest of the team was focused on designing efficient user flows, I took the lead on two critical aspects: conducting accessibility tests to develop design guidelines and prioritizing the product roadmap with the Android engineering team.
My focus was on ensuring the solution would not only be user-friendly for our staff working with gloves and barcode scanners but also align with technical feasibility and scalability. This approach allowed us to quickly identify potential usability challenges and prioritize key features, ensuring a smooth and efficient development process.
Delivery
We built a cohesive Figma library and Kotlin component library documented on Zeroheight which empowered other teams to meet accessibility standards while maintaining consistency across products. This system not only ensured that our solutions were user-friendly and scalable but also streamlined the development process, allowing teams to deliver cohesive and accessible features efficiently as we expanded into new markets.
