Empower Frontline Teams to Engage Customers
Goal: Introduce a product that would allow retailers to create branded ‘a la carte embeds’ on Brickwork powered store pages showcasing their unique store identity through appointment booking, hosting on site events, blogs and special announcements.
Staff Hours - Brainstorming with the Client
Brickwork had an existing tool for entering staff hours; however, it was slow to load, required a lot of clicks to access an employee's information and was taking store managers too much time each week. It was essential for us to solve this in a fluid way so that we could surface the employee's hours on the front end for users to book appointments with that store.
We were fortunate enough to have some incredible clients who sat through several whiteboarding sessions where we discussed everything from building out a workforce management tool to ingesting this data from their current tool. Those solutions were either too complex to build given our resources or didn't work quite right for a multi tenant platform.
Ultimately, we ended up using many screen recordings to discover how teams were entering hours in their primary tool and how we could duplicate a similar model in Brickwork.
Staff Hours - Wireframing & Prototypes
What I came up with was an interface that allowed managers to access all employee hours from a single page reducing the drill down into an employee's profile from 3 to 1. I also introduced the ability to set the start day which would allow for retailers to schedule their weeks on a preferred start day. For example one retailer's work week might start on Monday where another begins on Sunday.
In addition I wanted to give managers the ability to quickly tab through data versus a drop down solution in the previous version. The tab system allowed clients to read a schedule and type without stopping to move to a new section. I also realized employee hours are closely aligned with the store's open/close times, so I introduced default hours to align with the store's hours.
Staff Hours - Hi Fidelity
The final result was a highly effective and allowed our retail clients to quickly enter in their associate's hours. It satisfied our client's pain points enough for us to not embark on a more complex solution.
Wireframing Client Solutions for Appointment Management
The second part of creating an appointment booking system was to build an appointment tool for retail clients to manage their daily schedules. We needed a place for retailers to quickly see the names of upcoming appointments, to determine what their status was, and take the appropriate calls to action like checking in a shopper or rescheduling a shopper.
We also needed to create an interface that worked across desktop and tablet as most of our retail partners were using these devices in store versus mobile.
Hi Fidelity Solution for Appointment Management
The final result was a tool that allowed store teams to quickly see what's on deck for the day and manage shoppers. We also allowed for real time check in which encouraged the staff member to add notes and other details turning customers into clients.
Creating a Better Retail Experience Through Unique Store Pages
For the front end, I was responsible for generating a library of fully responsive store page templates that could be customized and branded for each retail partner. Below is an example of one of these templates and the fully customized version the client chose.
Real Results
Our tools delivered incredible results for our clients. Below is a quick recap of one retail partner's success using Brickwork's appointment booking software.
