Lindt chocolate cafés

The challenge: retain and attract customers to Lindt cafés

Lindt chocolates have a strong brand presence in Australia, but Lindt cafés do not. How can Lindt's chocolate cafés become a more attractive destination within Australia's booming café culture?

Lindt have a number of cafés in major cities across the globe, serving hot drinks, desserts and meals, as well as selling chocolates.

Mix 3 UXers, 2 weeks and a lot of chocolate and here's what you get.

Research findings: Lindt cafés have an image problem

Visiting cafés and competitors, observing and surveying customers and staff revealed that the café experience was fantastic, but it had a very traditional image and low awareness, hence a narrow target market.

Figure 1: SWOT analysis of 3 Lindt cafés in Sydney
Strengths include:

Customer Personas: The office worker, the tourist, the social butterfly

Clientele to Lindt cafés vary with location, with the majority being locals (John, the office worker) or passers by (Michelle, the tourist). The exception is Sarah, who visits with her friends for special occasions.

These customers are middle class and conservative in their tastes, appreciating Lindt's heritage and quality.

Figure 2: Three main types of customer to the Lindt cafés.
The time-poor office worker, brand loving tourist and social butterfly.

Severity matrix: pain points were awareness and payment friction

We prioritised customers' pain points, identified during the research, using a severity matrix.

Raising awareness would increase customers, reducing payment friction would reduce queues and improve the customer experience.

Figure 3: Severity matrix identifies customers' key pain points.
A venn diagram with pain points grouped into 3 overlapping circles: severe, frequent and easy to fix. The key pain points within all three circles were: findability, awareness of cafés' existence and location, awareness of menu range, queues. Physical payment was frequent and easy to fix, so it is highlighted.

Cost benefit analysis: promotions and sweeteners

Strategies that would solve customers' pain points were evaluated with a cost benefit analysis. This allowed us to identify realistic and effective solutions. We discovered that many of these ideas involved promotion, but also improved the customer experience.

Figure 4: Cost benefit analysis of ideas
Ideas such as supermarket promotion, refer a friend, signage, global loyalty program, e-payment and chocolate art were considered low cost/high benefit solutions. Ideas such as celebrity chef, design your own drink were considered high cost/low benefit solutions.

Solutions: refer a friend, loyalty program, frictionless payment: on track, on brief

To show how our solutions meet the needs of each persona along their journey we created a solution map. The solutions we focused on targeted creating awareness through the 'refer a friend' and loyalty program in all three personas and the 'frictionless' payment, which specifically targeted John, the business user.

Figure 5: problem-solution map

Design Feedback

Figure 6: Initial iterations.

Final design: innovative, yet familiar

Instead of requiring users to download yet another app, I considered the use of a chat bot. This would be more familiar and still allow one touch ordering, loyalty updates, notifications and friend referral, and require fewer interfaces. Payment would be handled by Apple or Google Pay.

Figure 6: Final iteration.

Outcomes: we may be on to something!

Speaking with a store manager, we were told that Lindt had similar plans to launch a mobile app with a loyalty program! Validation!

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