About ezCater
ezCater is a U.S.-based corporate catering platform that connects businesses with a nationwide network of restaurants and caterers. Companies use ezCater to order group meals for everything from significant events to everyday team lunches, while the platform manages restaurant discovery, ordering, logistics, and delivery coordination.
Relish by ezCater is the company's workplace meal program designed for recurring office meals. Organizations set schedules and budgets, and employees individually select meals from a rotating list of local restaurants. Orders are packaged per person and delivered to a central office, giving companies a flexible way to provide daily or weekly meals without operating an in-house cafeteria.
Challenge
We had millions of Relish customers who ordered food regularly, but order reviews were at an all-time low. We had limited data to help restaurant partners improve their menus and food items. The current order review experience was hard to find, and we didn't push our orders to review their orders. We needed to revisit our current Relish order experience to understand the reasons for the lack of customer engagement. I surveyed 70 customers, and the results were that 97% of our Relish customers have left at least one review, but almost 90% of those individuals never reviewed an order again. Our customers thought the review process was too long, that the questions we asked were unclear, and that they didn't have time to submit a review. Additionally, if an order was excellent, we had no way to tag what was outstanding about it; we only collected data on the dissatisfied orders.
Solution
After I surveyed our Relish customers and analyzed research and current Relish data, I led a brainstorming workshop for our Relish product team (1 product manager, one engineering manager, four engineers). In the workshop, we identified five themes, which included:
Engaging our customers after a set time period after their order arrives
Create less friction and make order review information visible to our customers
Create clear messaging around what we are using the order reviews for
Use familiar design patterns when providing questions
Use a consistent approach that scales across both Relish and ezCater ordering platforms
We ended up taking action on all the themes in our approach. We engaged our customers 15 minutes after they received their order via an in-product nudge. This nudge pops up in the customer's mobile app with a single-question prompt to review their order and rate it with a star. Once selected, we expand the pop-up and only ask two additional questions before submitting the review. We incorporated tags based on the star rating, with negative and positive ratings represented. We implemented the new order experience across iOS, Android, and web applications.
Within the first month, we saw an 80% increase in review participation (beating the plan by 20%), and 92% of our orders completed their review. We also saw a 63% increase in repeat order reviews. Additionally, we added new metrics to the restaurant partner dashboard to help them gain more clarity on successful and dissatisfied orders. We also saw an increase in refund requests after adding a link in the new order review experience to help customers request refunds; this was much faster than reaching out to our customer support team via email.
Contribution
As the Lead Designer, I owned the end-to-end discovery and design of the Relish order review experience, guiding the project from research through delivery across web, iOS, and Android. I led customer research and analysis, including surveying 70 customers and synthesizing behavioral insights that identified key barriers to participation. To translate those findings into an actionable strategy, I facilitated cross-functional ideation workshops with product and engineering partners, aligning the team around shared design principles and solution themes. I designed the complete UX flow and UI system for the new in-product review experience, balancing simplicity, clarity, and scalability across platforms. Throughout execution, I collaborated closely with product management, engineering leadership, and mobile teams to ensure feasibility, consistency, and on-time delivery, ultimately driving an experience that significantly increased review participation and generated more meaningful feedback for restaurant partners.
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