Tiny Tails to You • Consultant • 2017 - 2018
12x faster orders for a local favorite
Tiny Tails to You is an interactive and ethical traveling petting zoo, serving Central Texas since 2010. Each experience is designed to engage the young in age and the young at heart! They travel to you to bring animal snuggles for all kinds of events.
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Problem
The process of handling orders proved to be excessively time-consuming and challenging. Customers faced difficulties in understanding which services to order, leading to further delays and back-and-forth communication before finalizing an order. Creating quotes consumed a significant amount of time for staff members, and customers would often retract their orders once the quote was provided. After orders were placed, there was a lack of effective tracking, inability to request customer feedback, and inadequate reporting on sales, performance, conversion rates, and other important metrics.
Proposal
Redesign the brand, website, product offerings, and backend order management system in order to increase business efficiency and more clearly communicate with customers. Additionally, the business logic needs to allow for a more scalable and automated infrastructure.
Impact & outcomes
The redesigned website and marketing ecosystem led to a substantial increase in bookings, improved user engagement, and enhanced overall business performance.
Order velocity
12x
Orders are now processed in minutes instead of hours.
Efficiency gain
+70%
Increase in order processing speed across the sales team.
Refining a growing business
The scope of this project began with considering how the business could become more streamlined to open in a new city the following year. This led to designing an automated ordering process, while maintaining manual control of important aspects of the order.
Designing a seamless customer experience necessitated considering every detail of the customer's experience, from initial interest to purchase. This experience needed to coordinate well with the operations and administration teams.
Simplified services
Each service was defined by the number of people interacting with the animals. This informed how many animals and staff were needed. A large group of people required a larger number of animals, to ensure the safety of the animals and respect not over-handling them. This, in turn, required more staff members to run the event.
One of the biggest challenges Tiny Tails to You faced was bargain shoppers. Unlike other services, where customers can shop sizes and prices, Tiny Tails to You events have a size requirement. Part of their time was spent explaining to customers why they had to have a larger size for their event. This led to frustrated customers and lost sales.
The solution: remove the user's ability to select the size of the zoo themselves. The answer to the question "How many people do you expect to interact with our animals?" automatically selects the corresponding size. This also sets up the base price for that customer's instant quote.
The lead form
On average, customers were spending upwards of thirty minutes filling out the reservation form on their website. Thirty minutes is an absurdly long time to spend ordering a luxury / playful service. We needed a way to reduce the time for each reservation and get the essential information for what the Tiny Tails to You staff needed in order to assess if a customer was serviceable. We came up with 8 fields: Age Group, Date, Flexible, Number of People, Zip Code, Name, Email, Phone.
The lead form submits the information to their CRM database, and passes the information to hidden fields on the "Experience" form. This way customers are seamlessly brought into the more complicated experience form, and if they bounce or abandon the experience form, Tiny Tails to You is still able to capture their information and put that lead into a sales funnel.
Once implemented, the average time customers spent on their forms went down by over 68% percent. The average time spent on the lead form is around 90 seconds, and the reservation form is just under 7-8 minutes. The experience form also presents customers with a quote price for their event, including travel fees (calculated from the zip code entered on the lead form). This simplifies the price even more, making the buying experience that much easier.
The order form is fully customizable, allowing customers to upgrade their size, add extra animals, glitter tattoo artist, a photographer, and more.
Automated efficiency
Automation is a key part of running a business at any scale. With clean, organized, and structured data we were able to setup automated marketing emails, automated service and transactional messages, weather alerts, feedback requests, dynamic invoice creation and sends, reminders, internal company alerts, and more.
Staff are able to process customer orders significantly faster, with the average processing time becoming 12 times faster, from almost an hour per customer to just under 5 minutes per customer.
With most of the system automated, this allowed the team to focus on other parts of their work, while continuing to provide an individualized and personable customer experience.
Analytics
With every customer data point, interaction, and touchpoint saved in a database, we are able to build custom reporting to analyze the data and get insights on customer behavior and business performance. This has allowed Tiny Tails to You to understand their target demographic, average customer value, gender, seasonal growth, sales trends, marketing efforts, and more.
The analytics is fully customizable through Airtable, allowing staff to build new insight reports, or update their dashboard as the company evolves and grows.
A unified brand experience
The brand identity was crafted to be seamless across both digital and physical touchpoints. The playful illustrations, warm color palette, and friendly tone of voice on the website set a specific expectation for the customer: a service that is professional, safe, and delightfully fun.
This experience is carried through to the event itself, where staff uniforms, signage, and even the animal handling mats reflect the same visual language. By aligning the digital user experience with the in-person service, we created a cohesive brand narrative that builds trust and makes the entire process—from booking to the party—feel effortless and distinct.
The web experience
The website was designed to showcase an organized, clean, and simple experience. The goal is to translate the ease, simplicity, and clarity of the user experience all the way through to the event. Every event is highly organized and efficient, while also being adorable, fun, and engaging.
At its core, the purpose of the website is to get customers to fill out the Availability (lead) form. With that in mind, every page converts the visitor to this form. The evolving reasons for why they should complete the form range from checking availability, getting pricing, booking your event, or requesting a call. This funnels all visitors into a single, optimizable, and trackable funnel.
The foundation for growth
The transformation of Tiny Tails to You went far beyond a visual refresh. By automating the core of their logistics and sales pipeline, the owners, Chelsea and Joe, were able to shift their focus from repetitive administrative tasks to business development and team culture.
The streamlined workflow significantly reduced stress for their staff, fostering a happier work environment and allowing them to deliver a higher quality of service. Ultimately, these changes provided the foundation for sustainable growth, proving that powerful design and technology can be a game-changer for small businesses.
Skills & competencies
Key areas of expertise and methodologies applied during this project.