Optimizing Business Messaging Capabilities in Indonesia

The Challenge

Our client wanted to understand the relationship its Indonesian audience have with business messaging: the motivations, barriers, and values of communicating with businesses on their platform.

However, Indonesia was a country and culture they knew very little about! In order to truly understand their users’ relationship with business messaging and how they connect with businesses, they knew they would need to root into who these individuals are, what their daily lives entail, and what their culture is like.

The Approach

We needed to grasp the broader cultural context. We designed a week-long immersive experience for our clients, integrating into the daily lives of platform users and providing a deep dive into Indonesian culture.

Traveling to Jakarta, we ran discussion groups across different socioeconomic classes to uncover the current drivers, barriers, opportunities, and gaps on the platform when messaging with businesses. We also conducted ethnographic research in users’ homes, allowing us to meet and observe the people who rely on the platform daily. Additionally, we engaged with business owners to gain insights into their perspectives of the platform and how they wanted to leverage it to grow their businesses.

Finally, we organized immersive shopping tours with our clients, visiting local wet markets and trendy shopping centers, to provide a more comprehensive cultural understanding of the businesses that Indonesians frequent.

The Impact

Our clients gained a deeper understanding of their users’ needs when it comes to business messaging, translating them into opportunities for new feature development, current feature optimization, and in-app messaging considerations.