Up to forty million people are using delivery app services, and over five million people are ordering food using these apps every month. As these services grow, the competition between new similar services is getting intense and they tend to populariz...
Up to forty million people are using delivery app services, and over five million people are ordering food using these apps every month. As these services grow, the competition between new similar services is getting intense and they tend to popularize between users who pursue convenience. At the same time, small businesses from local commercial areas that lack marketing knowledge such as store advertising are actively utilizing delivery app services that have many users to run stores.
However, as the services grow massive, various problems are being raised due to the publicness of the service ecosystem as well as market monopoly and oligopoly.
Above all, the solutions for the services’ problems were centered around the interests of the platform providers and orderers, somewhat excluding the interests of store owners.
Through literature research from the view of service design, we confirmed that service environments establish positive value-in-use by sharing experiences among users and through the process of value co-creation between interested parties. From this view, we judged that conflicts between interested parties of the delivery app services that achieved big success with on-demand O2O services occurs when establishing value-in-use during the value co-creation process.
In particular, there is a need to look at the problems that was caused due to insufficient understanding of the interested parties of the store owners’ service environment using service design methodology.
Service platforms providing on-demand O2O services such as delivery apps become the ‘platform providers’, store owners that sell products by joining the platform become the ‘service providers’, and people that visit to buy the products of the store owners become the ‘orderers’. There is a need to use the persona methodology to predict the scenario, attitude, and characteristics of the service participation process of store owners who are somewhat excluded from service management. This is because this methodology reveals the relationship between the store owners and the service, which is vague when seen from another perspective. To collect data for creating personas, we conducted in-depth interviews and figured out that the most frustrating aspect for store owners is the orderer-centered service.
This is because platform providers only provide interfaces that satisfy various orderers such as ordering requests, delivery food evaluation, and safe numbers.
The most important process in reducing the frustration of store owners due to orderer interfaces was understanding their service environment.
By synthesizing results deducted from the affinity diagram made with the in-depth interviews, we figured out that the store owners were also ‘users that consume advertisements’ of delivery app platforms. In delivery apps, store owners were classified as ‘non-consumers’. They were separated as ‘service providers’ that only provide services to orderers and raise sales.
Based on this result, we confirmed that store owners should also be classified as specific consumers. In addition, there a window where store owners and orderers can communicate from an equal position is needed instead of the current one-way order issuing communication method.
To solve the problems that occurs during service management, platform providers propose orderer-centered solutions and revise management policies accordingly.
These management policy revisions are unilaterally informed to store owners, which makes them feel isolated and uninfluential to the services.
Such orderer-centered problem solutions have to be replaced with revisions that consider the interests of store owners to improve the trust relationship between platform providers and store owners.
The ‘primary persona’ and ‘secondary persona’, which was proposed as a result of this study, was made as an index to comprehensively understand the major types of store owners. These personas are useful in that it can be presented as verification data for service improvement. Moreover, it gains significance for suggesting the direction of the virtuous cycle among the interested parties of the service. It is also expected to have positive effects on the value-in-use of delivery apps during value co-creation.