Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I am an engineering student and due to covid 19 pandemic I was completing my graduation from  home. My father is a shop owner and I occasionally help him in running it whenever I get the time  from my studies. Covid 19 pandemic impacted on our shop business to due to lockdown restrictions  all over the country our sales fell down by huge numbers. Since the shop was allowed to open for  few hours during the day and had to be remain closed on weekends the sales were minimal, But the  real challenge came after the lockdown was over. After lockdown sales increased a little but hey  were not same as before. To overcome this problematic situation, I made various case reports on  how I can help in increasing the sales by finding out the reasons behind why customers were not  coming to shop and what approaches to use to get back on track after hard times.

Selection

I along with my father discussed the repercussions of covid and how it has impacted on consumers,  then I gone through various thinking process to find optimal approach to talk to customers and  gather data to get results on how the sales were impacted and reasons behind so much customers  not buying from our shop. Mind mapping is the greatest tool of design thinking which can be used to  collect data and gather insights which might be missed in normal thinking processes.

Application

I started with a single idea which was finding insights on local customers by mapping their daily  needs and activities to gather insight in their lives about how they spent money on general  household items. I asked customers who coming to our shop to put a sticky note on the chart which  was Infront of shop telling what they like about our shop and what they except from us in terms of  quality, quantity of products, our customer relationships. I also floated online forms asking  customers two things about our shop what makes us different from other shops and how would  they rate us in terms of our marketing experience. We used different colour notes for different level  of ratings and user experience. We collected data at the end of each day and start making clusters  with help of customers like how we can improve section, what we do best, ratings of our services.

Insight

The first insight we found that people were concerned for their safety in the pandemic times so they  were more likely to order online things if necessary or buy things in less quantity because of financial  problems everyone was facing due to lockdowns and economic slowdown. The second insight was  those timings of shop opening were not very compatible with customers as there were restrictions  on allowed movement people had to do all their works in that time on because of that they were  getting late and not able to reach shop on time.

Approach

The Approach we used was simple we first asked customers to text their grocery list to us and tell us  about the timing when they will come to get their products. We packed their orders in advanced  which saved time and customers haven’t had to wait to get their groceries which resolved the issue  of time management in restrictions of movement after lockdown. We increased our marketing by  giving customers free printed masks with our shops logo to encourage people to wear masks and  also it acted as advertisement or our shop. We also allowed customers a two days relief period in  which customers were given their orders on time and the needy ones were given offer to pay the  bills in two time period. Customers were given option of the orders were greater than a certain  amount then they were given offer to pay in two instalments within the time period through online  transaction. For our safety and customers protections we installed plastic sheets to protection  against the virus and customers were instructed to wear masks and sanitize them at the entry of  shop. This mind mapping tool allowed us to find analysis of our customer needs and offer a strategic  solution to a problem using design thinking innovation.

