Messaging Platform
Vagaro Connect
Instant messaging for businesses to communicate with their customers and teams.
The Project
ROLE
Design Lead
COLLABORATED WITH
Development lead, engineering lead, product marketer, and product researcher
TIMELINE
10 Months
Company Background
Vagaro is a comprehensive business management platform designed primarily for service-based industries like beauty, wellness, and fitness. The platform offers a suite of tools that help businesses of all sizes streamline their operations, manage bookings, handle payments, and market their services.
Problem Statement
1. Multiple and Fragmented Communication Channels
Businesses often face challenges in maintaining consistent communication with customers across different channels (e.g., phone, email, social media). This fragmentation can lead to poor customer experiences, as interactions are not always cohesive or easily tracked.
2. Missed Revenue Opportunities
Without a streamlined way to follow up on customer inquiries or promote services, businesses may miss out on potential bookings, upsells, and repeat customers.
3. Lack of Privacy and Professionalism
Business owners and staff often use personal phone numbers for customer communication, which can blur the lines between personal and professional interactions, compromising privacy and professionalism.
Understanding the Messaging Industry
We did competitive analysis of existing messenger apps like Whatsapp, Facebook/Instagram Messenger, Teams, Viber and how users used them. The key insights we found and ideas that shaped our design are:
Customers have certain expectations over commonly used features, so messaging falls under that category.
Even among the different messaging applications, there is not much deviation.
Conceptualization & Design
01
Brainstorming and Wireframes
As with all the products we build at Vagaro, we always ask the question 'What extra benefit would our businesses gain from using our messenger versus one they already use?'.
We worked with our product marketer and researcher to understand how users are currently communicating and what channels they use. And created high-level wireframes to map out what functionality will exist on which screens.
02
Designing for Usability and Adoption
One of the key areas we focused on was incorporating the feature into our existing product software. To drive adoption of this feature we had to create multiple touchpoints throughout our product that allowed our businesses to easily initiate the messenger feature.
Another factor in design was creating a brand new mobile app just for the messenger feature. Since there's 2 apps we had to make sure they seemlessly interacted with each other for ease of use. The decision to opt for that instead of incorporating it into our existing app, was to leave flexibility to scale this project into bigger vision. (But we'll leave that as a company secret for now)
03
Implementing and Beta Testing for Success
We worked closely with our development and engineering team and provided feedback through the constant demos. When we were finally satisfied with the functionality we took a field trip to one of our beta testing businesses and studied their whole team onboarding to Connect. We continued to keep in close contact as our beta testers chatted with teammates and customers.
Some of feedback we recieved from them were validating because we were already on the way to releasing it soon as an update. Such as wanting a notification in our main Vagaro Pro App and not just the Connect app.
Finding the Solution
PROBLEM
Multiple and Fragmented Communication Channels
SOLUTION
Created a 1-stop shop and consolidated business communication to one platform within the product. Especially for our enterprise businesses that need consistency with multiple locations.
Missed Revenue Opportunities
Reduced the time and effort required for businesses to manage customer interactions, leading to increased productivity and transformed conversations into actionable outcomes, such as booked appointments or completed purchases, directly through the messaging interface.
Lack of Privacy and Professionalism
Added a professional phone number to use for texting customers so businesses no longer need to use personal phones, which blurred the lines between personal and professional interactions.
Features
Adding Unique Values o he Product
Upsell Links for Bookings and Products
Quick links for businesses to easily send promotions to get customers to book more.
Key Customer Data for Tracking
Keep track of upcoming customer's appointments or past bookings.
THE IMPACT
118K
Total Messages Sent
25%
Monthly Growth in 6 Months