EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Nowadays, the online shop plays an increasingly important role for selling goods and services. Unfortunately, many online shops focus too much on their online sales funnel, which aims to lead as many people onto their website as possible, but as soon as someone visits their online shop, there is often no mechanism to establish a customer relationship and to turn leads into customers. The young start-up ALLstore wants to change this problem with its customer engagement plugin solution.

Goal

In cooperation with a student group of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the aim of this project was to develop new customer engagement features within the existing software solution of ALLstore. Furthermore, the existing and new mechanisms should be validated based on the outcome of the research.

Methodology

To reach these goals, the Design Thinking method was applied throughout the project. For this human-centered approach, the first step was to empathize with the target groups – online shops, online shoppers and digital agencies. Therefore, about 90 interviews with members of the target groups, desk research and self-tests were conducted. From the gathered data, ten key insights were derived, from which four then initiated the ideation phase. Countless rough ideas were generated and finally narrowed down to the top ten most innovative ideas with the greatest potential for ALLstore. Based on these ideas, rapid prototyping with iterative testing and feedback loops with the target groups were applied to quickly review and advance approaches and assumptions.

Results

The research showed that there is great demand for innovative customer engagement tools for online shops. It was identified that classic customer loyalty programs have many flaws which could be solved with the engagement solution from ALLstore. Whereas discounts are a decision factor for many people when shopping, there is also a strong need for non-monetary incentives. Finally, based on all the insights gathered, three additional prototypes of gamification features were created which will enhance customer engagement in online shops.

Cooperation Partner

• ALLstore GmbH
  Zeltgasse 4
  1080 Vienna
  Austria
  www.allstore.at

Contact Person

• Luis Gringinger
  gringinger@allstore.at

Student Team

• Tobias Bodzenta
  Lukas Eberhart
  Olivia Gangol
  Daniel Keinrath
  Yana Reznyk

Project Manager

• Linn Kretzschmar, MSc

• Erik Kommol, MSc