Chope is Singapore's biggest restaurant reservation app that connects diners to restaurants through online ordering, restaurant discovery, table reservations, and deals. It operates across seven cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Phuket, Shanghai, Bali, and Jakarta) and is partnered with over 13,000 restaurants across Southeast Asia.
Chope offers a cloud-based table management solution called ChopeCloud to help restaurants take reservations, understand their customer base, leverage Chope's diner network, and optimize daily operations anytime, anywhere.
To curb no-shows and last minute cancellations, about 17.5% of merchants use ChopeCloud to collect deposits as a guarantee, either by charging their cards upfront or authorizing a hold on their credit card.
As a key contributor, I spearheaded designing the end-to-end experience across B2B and B2C teams where we conducted extensive research to better understand the problem space and collaborated with stakeholders in defining the problem, solution exploration and definition, UI design, and developer handoff.
Our scrum team was composed of 1 Product Manager, 2 Front-end Developers, 3 Back-end Developers, and 1 QA Tester.
Chope's restaurant partners, internally referred to as merchants, were churning due to issues with our existing deposit collection methods.
First off, I needed to understand our merchant and diner needs, motivations, and pain points when using the existing deposit functionality. I decided to source insights through user research to better understand the problem space.
While talking to our internal stakeholders (Sales and Ops), we found out that restaurants have raised issues with our existing deposit collection methods:
1. Charging diners a deposit upfront incurs restaurants hefty transaction fees — merchants lose an average of $3000 to fees
2. A hold on a diner's card lasts for 7-21 days even after the reservation has been attended — diners find having their funds inaccessible inconvenient and would often leave negative reviews on Google.
Insight 1
A number of restaurants don't want to charge deposits, but need a way to recover losses in case of a no-show.
Charging deposit fees can impact restaurant relationships with diners negatively.
To help restaurants build their relationship with diners and still have the assurance they need, they would normally ask diners to send them credit card details as a guarantee. This sensitive information is given out through unsecure networks such as email, text, or written on a piece of paper.
Insight 2
A number of diners don't have access to credit cards, predominantly in Indonesia and Thailand, making it difficult for them to complete reservations requiring deposits.
Based on our user interviews with diners in Indonesia, a significant population don't use credit cards as charging high interest rates are prohibited under Islamic Law. A more convenient way to pay for deposits in this market is through bank transfer.
"Some diners would make multiple reservations and forget to cancel, this created hardship for guests that needed to find availability. We are left with unused tables and would sit open if there were no walk-in guests. Deposits are in place to protect the business and open up availability for other guests."
I also sourced data from Mixpanel to understand a diner's behavior on the when going through the deposit payment process on the Chope app.
Findings: Higher drop-off rates on deposit request
Assumption: Diners are less motivated to complete the booking if there's a deposit required
We concluded that while the existing deposit features helped mitigate no-shows and cancellations, ultimately, merchants care a lot about saving up on operational costs from transaction fees and their reputation as a business.
While diners care about understanding what will happen to their credit cards, how much they will be charged, when they can cancel, and what happens if they fail to attend their reservations.
I studied popular TMS competitors such as SevenRooms, OpenTable, Tock, ResDiary, and Eat to understand their own take on the problem and generate ideas on how Chope can leverage these existing solutions.
Insight #1
Payment links as a secure way to collect credit cards
Competitors such as SevenRooms, OpenTable, and Tock allows restaurants to send a payment link for the diner to fill in card details. This helps merchant securely save a diner's credit card details for future charges and keep credit card details secure.
Insight #2
Enabling merchants to store diner credit cards
There are patrons who prefer to give out their credit card details through phone calls or emails -- SevenRooms, OpenTable, ResDairy, and Tock allows restaurant staff to store credit card details and tie it onto a reservation for future charges.
Insight #3
Charge diners from the table management system application itself
To improve restaurant staff efficiency, ResDiary and SevenRooms enable staff to charge directly from their applications. This makes it easier for merchants to charge for no-shows if needed, without having to go out of the application and creating a seamless all-in-one solution.
Provide a secure alternative deposit collection option without excessive transaction fees
Metrics: Increase in customer satisfaction scores, increase in merchant retention rate, decrease in transaction fees
Encourage more diners to book restaurants that require deposits
Metrics: Decrease in booking drop-off rate, increase in restaurant bookings
As a result of our research findings, we came up with an ideal user flow of what the solution would look like.
After countless iterations, discussions, and internal testing with stakeholders, we built the Save Card Information feature on ChopeBook (iPad) and ChopeCloud web / mobile web.
Setup deposit collection rules on web
Merchants can set when to trigger credit card requests through ChopeCloud and our table management system on iPad, ChopeBook. This will help merchants automate and customize rules based on their specific needs. For example, merchants can require credit cards for ad-hoc events (eg. Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, Christmas Day) at their own discretion easily.
Collect card details via secure payment links
Request credit card details securely by sending diners a link through SMS or through their email. Our goal was to give merchants the flexibility to charge diners later with their credit card on file, thereby reducing transaction fees only when diners need to be charged.
Save credit card details for later
Diners should be able to input their credit card details within 10 minutes to secure their booking.I worked closely with the B2C team in coming up with the ideal flow for collecting credit card details on the Chope mobile and web app. Our goal was to reduce the drop-off rate during the booking process once diners know they won't be charged yet and to make the feature available to Chope users.
Since enabling merchants to save credit cards as a deposit, we were able to:
✶ Decrease merchant transaction fees by 90% - S$3000 to S$300 for a well-known fine dining restaurant partner
✶ Increased merchant retention rate by 6% - salvaged 15 restaurants from termination as of Dec 2022
It’s crucial to note here that the data presented is also influenced by our sales acquisition efforts.
It's worth pointing out that we scoped down the project to the most impactful features to complete the existing user flow. That means removing features that would require too much time and resource to be developed as our timeline was heavily influenced by the urgency of merchants churning.
In the future, I would recommend to explore the following ways to improve product experience:
1. Charge and save cards directly on ChopeCloud
Similar to our direct competitors, we wanted to push the idea of charging on ChopeCloud. To materialize this feature, we would need more time to build a robust and secure credit card guarantee functionality and at the moment, our best option was to integrate with third-party payment services such as Stripe and Reddot.
2. Explore E-Wallet and Bank Transfer Integration
Currently, we only support Stripe for Save Card as other payment providers don't allow saving cards on their platform which limits the total addressable market to Singapore. It would be interesting to explore how might we increase conversion by integrating with popular wallets such as WeChat Pay (CN, SG), AliPay (CN, SG), TrueMoney (TH), GoPay (ID), and DOKU (ID) and increase the total addressable market for our pre-payments solution, as well as, make the feature accessible to a larger market.
3. Utilize saved cards from the Chope app
It would be useful and more efficient for diners who book via the Chope app with a credit card already saved on file to be able to use these across Chope services, and not just for purchasing deals.
Plan for research ahead. Before starting any project, it's important to step back and think of what you need to know, who you need to know it from, and how you need to get that information. As a designer, we want to be intentional with conducting our foundational research and efficiently acquire the information we need.
Regularly catch-up with stakeholders closest to your users. Set aside time to regularly get feedback from Ops and Sales about a feature that was shipped. We want to evaluate whether we've accomplished our set goals and success metrics and decide the next best action. A designer's job does not end after a feature is shipped, but extends beyond it.
Get alignment on team dependencies before project kick-off. While the B2B team was on-track in terms of delivery, we were heavily dependent on the B2C team to make the feature available on Chope. Given that the B2C team had priorities of their own, we struggled with aligning our roadmaps, which caused a bit of delay. It's important to identify and align with team dependencies to make sure that our timelines avoid any hiccups.