XingKeDuo

Setting the Scene

While you may not think the number of foreigners living in China is enough to impact a company’s success, I was surprised to discover that, at any given moment, over 600,000 expats and foreign students are working and studying in China.

Before I came to the company, XKD was trying to elevate their services for foreigners by creating a ten page English script which they would make their ~300 Chinese employees memorize and rehearse. They thought that this would be the most optimal solution because it was equivalent to the service they provided for their Chinese customers.

I immediately saw many designs flaws inherent in this approach:

• The native, mandarin-speaking, employees would take months to get a basic grasp of the whole script.

• If a foreigner deviates from the script or something happens that isn’t in line with the script, the employees would not know what to do.

• And lastly, foreigners would care more about the actual service and quality of the haircut instead of how fluid the experience was. If they end up with a bad haircut as a result of miscommunication or because of the aforementioned reasons, there is a very good chance they will not return no matter how great the service was.

Participant Observation

The first thing I decided to do was to visit a salon and conduct a participant observation study. Before I could start any other research, I needed to gauge what the current haircut experience was like.

I came in expecting a normal haircut, but it ended being unlike anything I had ever experienced.

• Appointments were booked immediately on WeChat and hairdressers would use it to determine your hairstyle (if you were a returning customer, it would suggest previous hairstyles as well as new hairstyles to try based on your salon history),

• From the moment they saw you, the hairstylists would refer to you by your last name (Mr. Mao) and promptly welcome you to your assigned seat,

• The hairdresser would then reiterate the hairstyle you wanted and clear up any details they might have missed,

• Then, they would hand you a cup of tea and use a special, latex-like material to seal up the gap between the cloak and your neck so that no loose hairs would fall in,

• After the haircut, they would vacuum your head with a specialized funnel in order to suck out any loose bits of hair as well as give you a face towel,

This meticulous attention to detail and customer-centric attitude that the hair stylists employed were qualities I rarely saw. In America, I was more used to just sitting down, telling them what hairstyle I wanted, and always feeling dissatisfied with the cleanup at the end of the service as my sharp, loose hairs would get stuck in my clothes and stab into my skin.

Not only did I enjoy the quality of the haircut itself, it was one of the most pleasant and worry-free salon experiences I had ever been in, all at an extremely affordable price.

Whether it was calling me by my last name, serving my choice of tea, or putting in the extra effort to clean up any loose hairs, I noticed that the salon service had been perfected according to a Chinese customer’s needs. Our hair is usually a lot coarser and sharper, which makes it very annoying if it lands into our clothes, we prefer to drink tea over any other beverages, and our last names are usually used in professional situations. These little details may not seem like a huge difference, but together, they made for a completely different experience. 

Keeping in mind the differences in salon experiences between those of China and those of America, I set out to conduct a market research study between two of most influential social applications from both countries, WeChat and Facebook, to see if I could discover why those salon differences occurred.

The following market research studies have been edited to be more concise and to also illustrate the conclusions I have drawn, please let me know if you want a more in-depth explanation and I will be happy to provide one.

Market Research - China

When you ask someone to name the most popular digital company in China, the one mentioned most often is WeChat.  It was created by one of the world’s largest Internet companies, Tencent, and was launched in early 2011. Ever since then, it has grown at a tremendous rate. The answer to WeChat’s popularity was found within its mass functionality and accessibility for Chinese customers; it provides an extensive and broad range of services for its users and is able to supply virtually anything that they might need.

Its groundbreaking application model originates from the implementation of its “in-app applications.” These third party applications and services, also known as applets, are hosted on and their products streamlined through WeChat’s network. As you scale that feature up to tens of thousands of unique, lightweight apps, it creates a fluid system in which WeChat is able to seamlessly integrate third-party content and services into its ever-growing “applet ecosystem.”

One of the main reasons why WeChat is able to cater to so many people living in China is because of the homogeneous population and analogous culture within the country. Most users have already adopted WeChat fully into their lives and Tencent has been able to monopolize the digital Chinese market.

Wechat is powerful in China because it combines the convenience of almost every single mobile commodity into one application. This centralized mobile platform, in a way, reflects the society’s own norms and how its people live their lives. China is a country that has blocked out foreign technologies for decades so that the native companies could have ample opportunities to develop their own products. However, this blockage has effectively prevented Chinese companies from generating foreign awareness as well. These factors, in turn, has created a market where hyper-personalization for Chinese consumers is the only way for new products to survive.

The success of a product in China is directly correlated with two overarching factors:

1. the integration of said product within the the digital lifestyle that WeChat has created as a result of its monopolization; and

2. how personalized and efficient the product is when used by Chinese consumers.

Market Research - America

In the United States, Facebook, Whatsapp, Venmo, and Instagram, among many other successful digital companies, are all driven by their core purposes. Unlike how these industries and corresponding functionalities all fall under WeChat in China, they are spread out across multiple companies in the US.

This difference in market behavior can be attributed to two main factors:

1. The demographics within the United States population is much more heterogeneous than that of China, making it harder for companies to focus on one consumer segment, and

2. there is no overarching platform like WeChat that ties the digital landscape together.

In China, businesses are accustomed to introducing their services to the general public through WeChat integration and are also used to their customers sharing the same demographic and culture.

Therefore, most Chinese companies usually follow the same flawed mindset when attempting to expand internationally: they utilize the same business plans and strategies used within the Chinese market.

These companies all end up unsuccessful because they did not understand how to cater towards more demographics and were lost in trying to find a one-size-fits-all functionality model.

People in America are much more diverse and they also spend much more time on computers due to the availability of faster internet connectivity and broader bandwidths. As a result, the success of most products in America is less dependent on how integrated they are within the “mobile lifestyles” of their users and more upon their accessibility, their functionality, and their general purpose.

From a business standpoint, Facebook is more concerned with the number of weekly and monthly active users on their network, while WeChat is more concerned about meeting the hourly needs of every user on their platform. Facebook and other western applications are less focused on appeasing a specific audience and are more-so designed to provide the best usability and maximum accessibility for its their users

Ideation

Earlier, I mentioned how amazing my haircut experience was at one of XKD’s salons, but that was only because I knew how to understand and read Mandarin. If I did not know much about the language beforehand or if I did not know how to use WeChat, it would have been very hard for me to communicate and understand what was going on.

This confusing situation would have resulted in a poor quality haircut and, as a result,  I would not have returned. 

Because time was one of the most valuable resources a growing startup had, I decided to categorize my solutions based on how long it would take to implement them.

short-term solutions

These are a few short-term solutions that can be implemented within a few weeks; they may not have the most depth or effectiveness but can be temporary placeholders while more intricate solutions are put into place.

• The first method is to teach hairdressing terms in English to the workers so that they can refer to their mental glossary of words when they are communicating to the customers about the haircut; they will view these words as a set of “tools” rather than a script to memorize. It will be much easier for them to remember a few words rather than memorize a whole script and they will, at the very least, be able to understand what type of haircut the customer wants.

• The second method is to have a hairdressing translation board in the store that has both English and Mandarin so that the foreigners and the workers are able to point and gesture out what kind of haircut is suitable. This make it even easier for the workers to discover what haircut the foreigner wants because they wouldn’t have to commit English terms to memory and it would facilitate communication between both people.

• And the last “short-term” approach is to hire a hairdresser that is already bilingual and has experience within the beauty industry. This method would be a lot harder to incorporate since there is a short supply of employees that fit this demographic. Also, this solution may not always be viable because of the available hiring pool at the time or because of how expensive these workers can be to recruit.

medium-length solutions

Next, these medium-length solutions may take up to a few months to implement; compared to the short-term solutions, they will be more effective in bridging the gap between foreigners and the Chinese hairdressers but may not be permanent fixes.

• XKD can alter their WeChat application in order to implement a built in translation device that automatically translates the foreigners inputs from English to Chinese and vice versa for the hairdresser. This way, the hairdresser is now able to answer most questions the customer may have digitally and also begin to offer the native level of service.

• The second option would be to purchase and integrate translation devices within the stores so that speech would be automatically translated for both parties. This solution would also allow the hairdressers to do more than just figure out what kind of haircut the customer wants.

long-term solutions

These solutions may take months or years to fully implement but XKD will completely become a company capable of international scope and can truly cater towards more types of customers. Obviously, this would probably not be enough for international expansion as XKD would need to alter its business model and services even more to acclimatize to the new markets, but this is a great start in that direction.

• Setup an English teaching program for its native employees

• or to keep hiring until they are able to have a bilingual worker in each of their stores.

I was able to present all of my research findings as well as share my solutions with the top executives of XKD in a 3 hour-long, bilingual presentation at the end of my internship. Shortly after, XKD took my solutions and drew up a business plan to incorporate them within their bilingual training programs. 

This training program eventually would flow down into their stores and will allow each of their 300+ employees to comfortably interact with foreigners. I was really happy that they were able to use my work and that I was also able to make an impact in such a short amount of time.

Conclusion

If I were able to work more on this project, I would want to test out my solutions and see how effective they are; it would be interesting to see if the changes affected the native customers as well. I would also want to go out and interview more customers, both native and foreign, to see what other issues may arise within the salon experience.

Overall, I was very glad that I took a leap of faith and traveled somewhere outside of my comfort zone; it has helped me to utilize my design skill-set in a completely foreign environment to create a viable solution in the span of a few months. Not only was it rewarding to design with transpacific demographics in mind, it taught me how to harness human-centered design thinking in an international setting.