Amazon Beside
Amazon Beside is a grieve recovery service that allow Amazon Eco user to use Alexa to interact with someone they loved.
Personal Contribution
Brainstorming - Finalized the project direction to a grief recovery service.
Secondary Research - looking into similar industries that are connected or can potentially be use in our concept.
Primary Research - Questionnaires design and execution.
Data analysis & generate - collecting data from the research process, use data affinitization to finalized the key points that must be included in the final deliverable.
Design Deliverable - Design and visualize the service with its system with the industries and service relation network, execution maps, and its potential.
Secondary research
Our team focus on research of funeral industry, grieve recovery process and report, current smart home devices, and machine learning. After conducting and analyzing collected data, we had narrowed our key results into the following 8 points.
After our team define the project direction, we have looked into articles, products, and services that have already published. Our re- search fields include similar services, technology trends, market movements, and academic articles. The insights that we found from our research would help us to redirect our purpose in the market.
Online Survey
Customer expectations need to be measured accurately in order to develop a successful new service. A major cause of failing to meet customer expectations for a lot of firms is the lack of understanding of what customers expect from the services (Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler, 2010). In favor of assessing our customers’ thoughts and their expectation on the value of BEside, we used several research tools combining qualitative research and quantitative research. We first conducted an online survey to collect general thoughts on memorizing their loved ones. There were 24 participants in total.
interview
Fourteen in-depth interviews were performed through the research process. All the participants are permanent residents in the US, but from different cultural background and reli- gions. We conducted organic interviews in order to understand their emotion and reflection on each part of the service.
Next, we conducted affinitization in order to understand and organizing the data we collected from secondary research and interviews. In the result, The second affinitization led us to more accurate insights than the first one. However, the first affinitization provided us with some details of the re- search that were not shown in the result of the second one. With these insights, we then moved on to the iteration of our concept.
service prototype
In this prototype process, we intended to find out if our customers are ready to accept this service. Participants were asked to choose a platform and features that best fit the service for them. In the end, we asked them what kind of interaction would they prefer to use BEside. We then defined the level of interaction that our participants imagined to perform through our service.
logo design of amazon beside
Referred to the service we created, the core is to help people through grief recovery by replicating the de- ceased one. The graphic identities and logos were developed along with accompanying styles for typefaces and color schemes. The team settled on the name “BEside” for the following reasons:
Company: The word “BEside” has the meaning of being on the side. We would like to deliver the message of “your deceased loved ones will always be accompanying you through grief.”
Spirituality: We emphasized on “BE-side” because we want to clarify the meaning of the person being on the other side of the world where they are in a better place.
Service encounter map
The service encounter map has showed a overall process of how the BEside grieve recovery service work.
service offering map
The core of our offering map is to offer a well-data-generated service that allows users to function in a security environment.
AUGMENTED OFFERING MAP
Our focus is to develop a mobile app as the core for starting. Users would also be able to use our service on web page, and Amazon Echo products with a full version service.
service channel map
The channel map shows the key interaction platform that a user is interacting with in each stage of setting up and using the service.
service ecosystem and value flow
The ecosystem map shows the type of value is exchanging in between the stakeholders in the service.
Actors’ relation
The actors’ relation map shows the supporting system in between each departments in order to maintain the service quality of BEside. For example, the spends that BEside need are all payed by Amazon. The value that BEside deliver to Amazon would be in-depth information collection instead of revenue.
Business Model Canvas
In this business model, several things need to be addressed. First of all, the customer relationships is gained within the core of our service, which would be overlapping with our value proposition. Thus, we didn’t address the customer relationships separately.
Secondly, we put Amazon and Alexa as our key partners be- cause, although we are a corporate sector of Amazon, we figured it would be more clear to address them as partners so there would be less confusion about the other internal sections.
Last but not the least, we iterated revenue streams in the original version of Business Model Canvas to value streams. As a corporate sector that offers a plug-in free service, we realized that it would be more logical for us to map out the value that we give to our umbrella company than trying to address the revenue we made. As mapped in the Actors’ Relation diagram, our revenue would be coming from Amazon since they would be paying the costs that we need.
value proposition
During the process, we figured that all of our customer segments are somehow overlapping, so we decided to use the value proposition canvas to map our value proposition more accurately for each segments. We found out that even though the value for Data Searcher and Event Meeter might seem the same in the first place, after mapping out the value proposition step by step, we realized that they actually receive different values from our service. Thus we separated the two into different customer segments.
service blue print
The service blueprint is the systemic map that help us to visualize what are the actors’ activities in each stage of our service. We have also listed the posible paint points from each stage and the corresponding opportunities. First we started with the users who would like to pass-on their information to the future generation, the major concern here is the agreement and function for them to allow us to collect their data and willingness of using our technology; the emotion does not play a major role in this section. For the users of our grief recovery service we have modeled our 3 personas to map out their emotions in each step based on their religious, technology readiness, and relationship with the deceased one. The paint points are specifically aligned with each personas that might be in their situation
future steps
A service can never accomplish all customer need, Amazon BEside is current offering the “trial’ and “full service” versions of service. In the future we are looking forward to improve our service quality with the help of future technology.
Thank you for spending your time for this project. Please, feel free to contact me with more detail.