The brief
Design wayfinding to help customers get where they need to in-store
Situation
Bupa was adding a GP Clinic to its flagship store in Sydney. It was a 3-storey high street retail tenancy, with a health insurance business on the ground floor, an Optical business upstairs, and the GP Clinic would be going into the basement.
Customers and staff had reported that customers were struggling to find their way to the Optical business, and the GP business unit feared customers wouldn’t know the GP Clinic even existed.
Task
Tasked with designing wayfinding and signage for the store to help guide customers, we investigated the tenancy to see how best to tackle this.
On observing, we noticed the store employed a greeter, and focussed there instead.
Action
Investigating the greeter, we found the greeter was not a full time role, rather an employee of the Health Insurance business - it was a based on a roster system, and each sales advisor took turns doing the role of greeter through the week.
Every minute the employee was rostered to do the greeting, they were not making sales, and since they worked for the Health Insurance business unit, as soon as they identified a customer as ‘not a Health Insurance customer’, that particular customer got less attention.
Through a series of workshops with the leaders of each of the 3 business units, we negotiated an agreement to regrade the role entirely and hire a dedicated greeter with an appropriate background.
Instead of producing any signage at all, we designed a job description, secured equal funding from each business unit, and hired for Situational Awareness as a core skill, focussing on applicants with a background in hospitality, specifically experience as a maître d'.
Results
Increased employee experience
The sales advisors didn’t have to pick up the greeting responsibilities.
Heightened collaboration
While the 3 business units were separate on paper, customers cared little for the distinction. The shared greeter behaved like a single front door for all 3 units.
Cheaper, faster solution
Although we didn’t produce any tangible designed artefact, we achieved the initial goal, and we did so faster and more cost effectively.