Amazon BEside

Secondary Research

We have looked into articles, products, and services that have already published. Our research 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 positioning 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.

User Interviews

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 religions. We conducted organic interviews in order to understand their emotion and reflection on each part of the service. 

Key Insights

This version of service encounter map, is an iteration based on our insights from research and prototyping. This service process is the one we believe is the first version of the service that could be launched into the market.

Physical Evidences All of the physical evidences were eliminated from the service, BEside would be a completely digitalized service that runs under Amazon.

Preference Settings The preference that customers would need to set includes the level of interaction, privacy of the conversation, and the emotion feedbacks they would get from BEside.

Exiting the Service Revoking the agreement does not necessarily mean that the user has completely recovered. The possible exit points include the cases in which the service does not reach the expectation, the user does not need anything else from the service, the grief is completely recovered.

Service Offerings

Augmented Offerings

The channels map helps us understand what are the possible methods that our users would employ to interact with our main and related services. We have listed the channels attending to the different stages of the service.

Chat bot is a channel that can filter our customers issues into levels. Some issues can be solved with simple guideline, and some might require special advisers for help.

Partnered psychiatrist would be an important external service that help solving mental issue for our users.

Digitalized channels are employed in Amazon BEside in order to allow more innovative customer interactions in the service.

We used this diagram to map out the customers’ and employees’ roles in the service. By clarifying each person’s role in this service, we have a better picture of how BEside manages as a business. We were putting ourselves as a partner with Amazon in this stage. However, we started figuring out the problems in this service as a business unit from this map where our revenue stream is not well defined.

Value proposition

Business model

After knowing our customers’ expectation and perception by primary research (Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler, 2017), we knew that when the service is related to grief recovery, the trust from the customers will be overwhelmingly related to the acceptance of our service. Also, customers’ emotions can also affect their perceptions of satisfaction with products and services (Price, Arnould and Deibler, 1995). The trust could be generated from word of mouth communications, personal needs and post experience (Kotler and Keller, 2012). From the insights of primary research, the following directions of marketing strategy should be considered to fulfill customers’ expectation and build trust:

Umbrella Brand Amazon is a world-wide known brand with providing convenient and reliable service, which could significantly make our customers to trust BEside on service quality. However, the disadvantage is the brand image of Amazon can be too business oriented for our service. While dealing with emotional issue, which could be extremely private, the image of “business empire” will sometime create negative reflection. On the other hand, BEside could also be a reputation booster for Amazon in a sense of social carer. How to find the balance of pros and cons will be a major topic in the future marketing.

Readiness of Platform The “customer readiness” is a major factor in determining whether customers will even try a new technology-based service. This factor also reflects our insights in primary research. While using BEside, hands-on experience could significantly increase the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of people, thus affect their attitude toward using. We will launch BEside simultaneously through all the platforms which could execute Alexa. According to our insights, 58% of our prototype participants imagine this service will be delivered through smart phones, our marketing strategy should first focus on the smartphone market. We should launch our trail with only texting function, the customers could interact with BEside through text, just like texting applications which they already familiar with.

Brand Image of BEside Instead of being emotional and telling people about grief recovery, BEside’s brand image should just illustrate our function of bringing only the “digital representative”, not the “real person”, of deceased ones to our customers in a peaceful mood. The first reason is, according to our interview, people are very sensitive to deceased ones. Also, according to our insights, 45% of our prototype participants could feel better after talking to a imaginary represen- tative of their deceased ones. In this case, there is no need to over-elevate customers’ emotion to promote BEside to cause side effects. Second, according to our interview, if we promote BEside as a “real person” could cause con- cerns such as religion, spiritual belief, and virtual addiction and damage our brand’s reputation.

Referred to the service we created, the core  is to help people through grief recovery by replicating the deceased 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.