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Deepening Customer Engagement with IKEA Retail

frog and IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) worked together to transform an underutilized customer club into a core part of its customer engagement strategy

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Creating a more rewarding experience  

How does it work? 

Collecting reward keys 

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Reward keys from IKEA Family, creating a rewarding experience for every member. 

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A rewarding experience for every member 

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IKEA saw that their customer club had potential to engage more members, in more meaningful ways. They wanted a new rewards concept that would activate support and recruit members towards the highest form of engagement—their home furnishing project journeys.

Growing IKEA Family’s impact 

Challenge

frog collaborated with IKEA to research, design and create a global rewards framework operating as a consistent way of rewarding customers across every country, whilst offering local countries flexibility to adjust.

Transforming engagement-driven loyalty 

Solution

After trials in Sweden and Spain, reward keys from IKEA Family has launched in Portugal, Italy and Australia. Work continues with frog to boost deployment to 27 markets, ensuring customers globally can benefit from a more rewarding experience.

Substantial growth, increased engagement 

Outcomes

Project highlights

IKEA’s expansion of the reward keys program shows confidence in the potential transformation to drive its membership engagement strategy forward and deepen relationships with customers.

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Expanding to engage the “many people”

Creating a Loyalty Program to Deepen Customer Relationships and Drive Cross-sell

Deepening Engagement & Loyalty with Their Best Customers

Transcending the Telco Op Model

Building a venture to forge a new definition of value for SMARTY customers

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Project overview

Digital-only, SIM-only: Remove all clutter and complexity: SMARTY stands out among competitors as a highly optimized, digital-only, SIM-only brand and experience.

Agile Technology: Start lean, scale up fast: In six months, the SMARTY tech team had a cloud-native web app up and running. It has now matured into an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure, resilient enough to handle rapidly increasing volumes of traffic. Supporting SMARTY’s ‘test and learn’ ethos to continuously improve the experience, the web team regularly runs A/B testing to improve conversion, retention and understanding of customer interactions.

Experience-led: Take note of feedback: SMARTY provides value to customers by listening carefully and often to their views on how to improve. Never straying far from its ethos, SMARTY has grown through word-of-mouth, with its customers proactively sharing their satisfaction with others.

Build capacity alongside product: Fuse expertise: SMARTY has been a multi-company, multi-geography design partnership from its outset: fusing frog’s expertise in design and technology with Three UK’s telco experience to launch and scale the new product in market. Digital marketing analytics, mobile app development, billing and network provisioning teams all unite to deliver the digital experience.

frog's work with SMARTY to disrupt the conventions of an overly complex and commoditized sector is underpinned by four pillars.

Disrupting telco conventions

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SMARTY’s mission has always been to find radical new ways to put mobile customers first. Following a swift build, launch and scale, the next opportunity was to grow the business while retaining SMARTY'S purpose, customer base and innovative differentiation in the telco market.

Directions for growth

The frog team’s pre-existing knowledge of the organization meant they could rapidly develop working hypotheses on how to give SMARTY customers what they want—and ultimately grow the business further. To test, refine and validate emerging theories, the team used a blend of secondary research, stakeholder interviews, focus groups and customer diaries.

Hypothesis-led testing

A probing, hypothesis-led approach led to rapid empirical insights and the development of a solid growth strategy. The team delivered an actionable technology roadmap to ensure SMARTY can move toward new value plays for the group market—individuals using their own SIM under a shared account—which had previously been underserved. 

Outcome

Equipped for new value plays

Next era of growth

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Visit the frog archives to <a href="https://www.frog.co/work/smarty-building-the-uks-highest-rated-mobile-network-in-under-6-months" target="_blank">learn more</a> about the launch of SMARTY.

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Meeting and exceeding goals 

Transforming Pet Care with AI

Grounding the Made of Air Brand

Delivery, Designed by Restaurants

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It’s never been easier to order delivery, but it’s never been more difficult for restaurants to make ends meet. 

While the largest food delivery apps have provided convenience to consumers during the pandemic, their <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/856444431/cities-crack-down-on-food-delivery-app-fees-as-restaurants-struggle-to-survive">predatory practices and massive fees</a> are threatening the very industry they claim to save. With vicious delivery competition and diminishing profits, many restaurants are facing a dire dilemma: go out of business quickly by avoiding the delivery apps, or go out of business slowly by adopting them.
Consumers are often unaware of these realities, and despite delivery apps’ high fees and poor customer service, all signs indicate that consumers’ appetite for delivery is only growing. The team at <a href="http://www.aurifybrands.com/">Aurify Brands</a>—owner of The Melt Shop, Le Pain Quotidien and more—witnessed this trend firsthand, as their restaurants moved to higher proportions of delivery orders and many of their fellow operators were forced to close down locations. In 2020, Aurify Brands became determined to build a better delivery marketplace, and turned to frog to help them create it. The result is Sesame.

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Defining a New Strategy
As restaurant operators themselves, the Sesame team understood that a marketplace business more aligned with restaurant economics must be driven by new customers and diner loyalty. But a critical question remained: Would consumers and restaurants use a new marketplace? Through detailed user research, frog showed that large majorities of both diners and restaurants would prefer and pay for a zero-commission marketplace, as long as its fees were modest. In order to make Sesame’s no-commission model work, frog helped Sesame determine the monthly subscription fees restaurants pay to access the platform, as well as the small fees charged to consumers on each order.
Research helped uncover other opportunities for differentiation as well. Restaurant operators expressed a strong desire to control their brand within the marketplace and manage their customer experience directly, which existing platforms do not allow. Additionally, they expressed frustration that major delivery apps don’t share customer data with restaurants. On the consumer side, frog’s research showed that Sesame’s critical differentiator is the altruistic appeal of doing more to support local businesses. But consumers also said they want more from the delivery experience than convenience, including tailored recommendations and better customer service and issue resolution when things go wrong.

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Creating the Brand
With these insights in mind, the frog team began developing Sesame’s brand strategy and identity. The heart of Sesame’s appeal, both to restaurants and consumers, is its promise to bring the hospitality, community and personal touch that defines in-person dining to the delivery experience. The team aligned on the name “Sesame,” which conveys openness and convenience, and focused brand positioning and messaging on the platform’s ability to strengthen communities by empowering small businesses. The brand expression frog created for Sesame uses an energetic and layered visual style to capture the spirit and personality of independent restaurants in a bustling city, while simultaneously elevating the brands of participating restaurants.
In the final phase of the partnership, frog worked closely and collaboratively with Sesame’s leadership to design and develop an MVP digital experience that would lay the foundation for Sesame’s future growth. Over the course of 18 weeks, frog compiled a complete product backlog, developed Sesame’s brand style guide and built a site map that defines the product structure and flows for both consumers and restaurants. While frog’s internal developers built the front-end consumer experience, Sesame’s back-end dev team completed the restaurant operator experience using detailed web design assets and documentation provided by frog.

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Delivering for Restaurants and Communities
With Sesame, restaurant operators can customize their profile and messaging to control their individual brand. They can also interact directly with their customers to provide the level of service and attention consumers have come to expect from other digital experiences. And with Sesame’s sales and customer data dashboards, combined with powerful built-in marketing analytics, restaurants have the strategic tools to advance their business organically.

For consumers, Sesame’s social media-inspired curation and recommendation tools provide opportunities for delightful discovery, helping them to experience all their local restaurant scene has to offer. The Sesame user dashboard also allows them to see how much money zero-commission purchases save their favorite restaurants, and donate Impact Points earned with each order to partner charities in their community. And through Sesame’s partnership with City Harvest, every order placed on Sesame helps feed hungry people in New York City.
Launching in New York City in October 2021, Sesame promises to completely redefine the delivery experience by bringing transparency, hospitality and connection to restaurant delivery—and by helping to rebuild the communities and businesses hit hardest during the pandemic.

A Sustainable Solution for Indoor Air Pollution

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For hundreds of millions of Indians, intense air pollution is a fact of life. In 2019, the nation’s air quality index was <a href="https://www.iqair.com/us/india">five times higher</a> than the World Health Organization’s recommended exposure levels. 
Such poor air quality is widely recognized as a major risk factor for many physical and mental health conditions. <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2542-5196%2820%2930298-9">Recent research</a> from The Lancet shows once again that its impact on India is significant: in 2019, air pollution was responsible for the deaths of 1.67 million Indians, leading to US$36.8bn in economic losses. Critically, over one third of those deaths were attributed to household air pollution.
That’s why a team of designers and engineers in frog’s Bangalore studio, along with frogs from Milan and Madrid, decided to tackle the problem of indoor air pollution. After conducting initial field research and market analysis, the team identified four key experience principles to drive the conceptualization and design process. 
Breathable: Air pollution makes even normal breathing feel difficult, so the solution must make breathing feel more effortless. 
Natural: Industrial pollution has caused the problem, so the solution must rely on natural and sustainable materials and processes as much as possible. 
Proactive: Many people are simply unaware that the air in their homes is polluted, so the solution must actively inform users about air quality to enable them to take appropriate action. 
Affordable: The majority of air filtration systems on the market are unaffordable for the average Indian consumer, so the solution must be less expensive. 
After conceptualizing multiple possible solutions, the frog team decided that moss, which effectively filters carbon dioxide and particulate matter, was the perfect natural material to build around. By housing the moss in a connected shell along with various air quality sensors, the team created an integrated filtration and feedback system equipped to provide users with real time air quality data through both mobile and web touchpoints. 
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Meet Vyoh
This natural, elegant concept further informed the product and brand development, resulting in Vyoh—an intelligent and sustainable biophilic filtration system that requires minimal maintenance and is always on. As this product is targeted for the Indian market, the name &#8216;Vyoh&#8217; was created by combining two Sanskrit words related to atmosphere – &#8216;Vyuha&#8217; and &#8216;Vayu.&#8217; 
A typical Indian household has approximately 22 &#8211; 60mgs of particulate matter. A Vyoh panel of 470x940mm can eat up to 40mgs of dust and 74gms of CO2 everyday. Based on existing data, a single moss wall of 900 x 1500mm can help to reduce dust and greenhouse gases everyday for a standard 2 BHK apartment in Bangalore, India.  
Unlike traditional air purifiers, Vyoh is a discreet and stylish functional element in the home. When manufactured, Vyoh would be roughly half the cost of electric air purifiers on the Indian market, with an initial estimate of ₨4500 ($59/€50).

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With its combination of function, design and affordability, Vyoh is a concept poised to help consumers in India and beyond breathe easier in a sustainable manner. 

Understanding Animals Through Technology

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“Our brand is perfect and feels like a beautiful old comfy chair that we’ve had forever. I can’t imagine any other incarnation now.” 

Training a dog can be confusing and time consuming, but hiring a professional trainer is expensive. That’s why a team of animal behaviorists and computer vision experts founded <a class="Hyperlink SCXW43330746 BCX4" href="https://joincompanion.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Companion</a>, a startup dedicated to helping dog owners train their pets through an automated, in-home behavioral training platform that combines machine learning, robotics, and advanced computer vision. After Companion approached frog with a working prototype, frog and Tuesday Capital decided to invest in and collaborate with the company to help optimize the physical design of their product, refine their brand, and craft a user experience that more fully realized their vision of fostering deeper relationships and understanding between pets and humans.  
In order to understand the fundamental value and experience of their brand, Companion provided us with functional prototypes so that frogs—and their dogs—were able to interact with the device daily. This opportunity provided powerful insights into the possible interactions between person, pet, and platform. We combined these firsthand learnings with the expertise of Companion’s behavioral specialists to define the overall design direction and key interaction features. To support the mission of building closer relationships between people and their pets, we developed an approachable design language that evokes the playfulness and empathy of dog behavior. At the same time, however, we realized that both the physical device and digital experience must be clean and professional, conveying authenticity, confidence, and expertise that dog owners can trust.

The frog team developed and presented multiple versions of an MVP app experience using remote collaborative interface tools, allowing the Companion team to experience and explore the options on their personal mobile devices, just as real users would. After experiencing the possibilities for themselves, the Companion team selected a final direction and we began building a comprehensive brand and UX playbook that provides detailed definitions, documentation, and assets for Companion’s brand strategy, brand identity, and UX. It also establishes a complete design language system and asset library that Companion can use to build new features quickly while maintaining the consistency, quality, and identity of their brand.  
Alongside the updated branding and digital experience, frog&#8217;s industrial design team helped optimize the Companion device. In addition to aesthetic updates, the internal components were repositioned for optimized performance and manufacturability. The internal microphone and camera were repositioned to provide clearer audio reception and video capture of live dog behavior, while the speakers were moved from the bottom of the device to the sides in order to ensure that dogs hear training commands as clearly as possible. 
Companion’s new brand identity and product design evoke the warmth and comfort of animal companionship while projecting the expert knowledge of animal behavior built into its underlying technology. The new interaction features and remote capabilities of the Companion app close the loop between human, pet, and platform by making Companion&#8217;s expertise accessible and transparent via remote controls and monitoring, automatic tracking and analysis of training data, and direct access to Companion’s team of professional trainers.

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Companion is poised to expand production and distribution with additional funding secured from Tuesday Capital, frog and others based on the strength of their brand and technology.

$8 million in seed funding

frog redesigned the physical Companion device to ensure the speaker, camera, microphone, and treat hopper locations enabled the best possible experience for pets and people.

4 components optimized 

The updated Companion app tracks and shares training progress across 19 different behaviors, with multiple levels of achievement within each behavior.

19 training milestones mapped 

Companion launched its new brand and product in March 2021, offering priority access to customers who sign up on their website. As this revolutionary in-home training technology rolls out during Spring and Summer 2021, Companion customers—and their pets—will be able to understand each other better than ever before. 

Empowering Customers through a Best-in-Class Companion Experience with stc


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Building on a long-standing partnership with stc, a leading telecom and technology service provider, frog designed a new company-wide design language system (DLS) to support stc’s massive rebranding effort and inform the design of new products and services. The flagship product of the award-winning DLS is the mystc app—a new, personalized digital platform that empowers stc customers to take control of their telecom services. Informed by in-field research in cities across the Middle East, the frog and stc team together raised the standard for self-service telecom experiences, driving new engagement across the region.

To ensure the redesign would suit the unique, evolving needs of customers across the Middle East, the frog team spent two weeks in the field between Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to better understand customer needs and pain points. In a UX assessment, frog and stc went through key flows within the previous application to identify challenges, and provide new solutions. The frog team conducted more than 40 qualitative stakeholder interviews in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while co-located with stc business leads and employees. frog then worked side-by-side with stc to perform a comprehensive technology assessment aimed at identifying current capabilities and defining new areas for ongoing improvement.


Deep, In-Field Research

Throughout the program, the frog and stc team sought to translate improved customer experiences into increased customer satisfaction and loyalty—all while reducing the company’s customer support effort. More than a self-service app for basic telecom services like managing phone lines and purchasing products, the mystc app offers an elevated lifestyle element throughout. Baked into the user experience is personalized, aspirational content and offers that go far beyond simple loyalty programs, to provide customers with meaningful, strategic guidance for incorporating their telecom services into their real lives.


From Utility App to Companion Experience

The new stc DLS, exemplified by the mystc app, is built on the customer experience principles of building trust, providing proactive personalization, empowering users and providing a seamless experience. As the first touch in customers’ relationship with the brand, the redesigned DLS ensures consistency across all digital stc services. frog designed the DLS to be a strong, extensible tool—a scaling, living, centralized repository of principles, templates, components and other assets that help internal teams accelerate their efforts.


Driving Cross-Regional Success with a DLS

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frog supported stc in defining their technology strategy for digital and achieving faster time to market. The team worked closely with business and IT stakeholders in Agile sprints to iteratively prioritize, design and develop product increments, shortening the feedback and approval cycle. frog built mobile and web applications with high quality UX and collaborated with the stc IT team to design an integration API layer. The collaborative API process created alignment on use cases and flows, and facilitated downstream final engineering and release activities.


Technology as Enabler and Accelerator

The work reflects a team of 30+ frogs across Europe and India, including in Milan, Munich, Delhi and Bangalore—following Agile product management and delivery methodologies. While initially collaborating largely in-person with stc in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the team smoothly switched to a remote collaboration structure at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic—without compromising on product quality or manner of delivery. To bring the product to market, the team brought in experts from the Altran Global Engineering Center in Ukraine, part of frog’s parent company. In addition, frog worked closely with the Interbrand team in Madrid to ensure the rebranding initiative was considered in context of delivering on the new brand promise in every screen, flow and interaction.

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