Pretotype 1 - Bridge between POS and WhatsApp

Idea

Bridge between SoftRestaurant© and independent delivery platforms.

Market Engagement Hypothesis

In addition to Rappi, UberEats and other delivery platforms, new, independent delivery services are emerging provided by small local groups. These services use WhatsApp as their main communication method, where businesses must send a message to request delivery service and stay alert for any changes; so, it will be useful if this process is automatic.

XYZ Hypothesis

X – At least 30% use

Y – Businesses that use independent delivery services.

Z – At least 10 daily requests.

At least 30% of businesses that use independent delivery services will use the program for at least 10 daily requests.

Experiment

Functionality test over a weekend in a local restaurant: El Panuchito.

XYZ Hypotheses

1 – In at least 25% of the orders made to El Panuchito, the time that the restaurant waits for the courier’s arrival will be reduced from 15 to 5 minutes.

2 – In at least 25% of the orders made to El Panuchito, the time that the courier stays on the restaurant before the order is ready will be reduced from 10 to 5 minutes.

3 – In at least 25% of the orders made to El Panuchito, the delivery price will be optimized due to more precise and immediate distance calculations using Google Maps.

4 – In at least 30% of the orders made to El Panuchito, the delivery time will be more precise, with an error margin of 5 minutes.

Method

For this pretotype the mechanical turk method was be used, in which the functionality of the program is simulated using a person to do the task instead of it being completely automatic. In addition, the provincial method was used, because the initial tests are going to be made in just one local restaurant.

The restaurant gave the opportunity to do this experiment during business hours, which shows interest in the program.

Storyboard

The interaction will be as follows: the employee will register an order, the ticket is printed with the client’s name, address and order total; then the employee is asked to estimate the time it will take for the order to be ready. Next, while the order is being prepared, the client’s address will be searched in Google Maps to get the distance, the delivery price is calculated and 10 minutes before the order is ready a delivery request is sent via WhatsApp.

As a token of gratitude for being part of the experiment, the restaurant is offered a couple of months of the program free of charge, when it is publicly available.

Resources

The necessary resources for this experiment are: one person, one smartphone, a pencil or pen, a notebook, Internet access and the business’ owner approval.

The total cost for these resources is around $50 MXN, just for the pencil and notebook, because the Internet access is provided by the business and the person will have its own smartphone.

The total time this experiment takes is 15 hours: 3 days, 5 hours per day.

Results

Results in general were aligned with the goals. 30 different orders were evaluated during the experiment. Compared to the original hypotheses:

1 – The average waiting time for a courier’s arrival was 8 minutes, a reduction of around 50%.

2 – The average waiting time for the order to be ready when the courier has already arrived was 1 minutes, a 90% decrease.

3 – There was not a single order which needed the delivery cost recalculated because of imprecise distance.

4 – The difference in delivery time was, on average, 5 minutes from what the client was told, which lies inside of the error margin mentioned before.

The results were positive, and according to the final questionnaire the client was satisfied with the service provided, which shows that the idea left a good impression and is possible to take it to the next phase.