Service design strategy to transform sales processes
James Chen, co-founded eyewear company Adlens in 2005 with a single mission, to create a world where everyone has access to eye care and spectacles. Chen founded ‘Vision for a Nation’ a charity that was innovating throughout Africa, delivering local eye care and low-cost self-adjustable glasses to some of the World’s poorest communities.
In 2016 Adlens turned their attention to premium markets targeting the 45+ age group, many of whom have declining short and near field vision and yet cannot get on with traditional varifocal lenses. Adlens had invented an innovative adjustable lens technology, unfortunately, the glasses were not selling well, and customers were failing to understand their unique benefits.
Services
- Trend Forecasting & Vision Setting
- Product & Service Design
- Brand Identity
- User Experience & UI
- Graphic Design
- Colour, Material & Finish
Learning
Unable to change the physical frame or lens design, Adlens engaged business consultants, McKinsey, to help them improve their commercial performance and tangerine to help them to understand why this innovative technology was not being adopted by their target market.
Through interviewing senior stakeholders and completing ethnographic and market research, we learned that the low uptake of adaptive eyewear was down to the user benefits of the product not being made clear, or even demonstrated, to the customer by, either the eye doctor or the sales consultants. A poor sales strategy was also being compounded by inadequate staff training plus poor sales tools. Critically, we discovered that the focus of Adlens’ marketing communication was on describing the capability of the technology, not the benefits that the technology could bring, a subtle but important difference.
Leaping
We generated an extensive customer experience map to identify where key interventions in the sales process could disrupt and increase sales. Armed with this, we traveled to Los Angeles, USA to set-up a prototype optician’s store and ran user trials that emulated the sales process to gain feedback and inform the development of the service design.
Throughout the extensive research process, we created a service design map of the current sales process and identified key areas of disruption that could introduce a clearer benefit-driven proposition for the consumer.
We transformed the dispensing and sales strategy for Adlens by disrupting the sales process to introduce the benefits of the adjustable lens system to customers at different points of the customers’ journey and by curating the existing product range to provide a clearer brand proposition to the customer.
Landing
We originated the Allfield brand, together with a ‘kit of parts’ to support the service design, including points of sale displays and product packaging, to help potential customers fully appreciate the unique and breakthrough benefits of Adlens’s adjustable glasses.
With a new name and brand proposition, purposefully targeted marketing and improved sales training, customers and opticians alike can now better understand the key benefits of how to manually adjust the lens of their Allfield glasses to see clearly at all distances.
To support this new initiative, we created a new Allfield website to help with the orientation and education process of prospective customers looking for a suitable to varifocals when they do not work well for them.
