Sint-Niklaas is a city in East-Flanders featuring a diverse entrepreneurial landscape. It's home to over 4,500 companies across various sectors and offers each of these businesses a wide range of services to assist in their growth - from start-up and scale-up support to proactive assistance for entrepreneurs in need of a helping hand.

In 2017, together with Stad Sint-Niklaas, we built ondernemeninsintniklaas.be in order to better inform entrepreneurs about the services available to them. With this new project, the city is taking the digitalisation of its services a step further by developing a digital front-office for enterprises that should enable more interaction and a personalised service. Entrepreneurs will be able to apply for products online via this e-counter.

During the project, Stad Sint-Niklaas can count on the support of the Flemish EFRO programme (The European Fund for Regional Development) with which Flanders wants to increase the competitiveness of entrepreneurs and stimulate employment.

Bringing the insights of the various entrepreneurs into such a digital transformation is crucial! Therefore Stad Sint-Niklaas approached Knight Moves.

Carrousel

Throughout the project, we adopt a broad approach, so that we can work towards a digital counter that covers all services. However, for the effective implementation we focus on three specific permits: the night permit, liquor permit and terrace permit within the hospitality industry. With this in mind, we started the research project with in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, city employees and external stakeholders. These quickly revealed a number of needs, such as the desire to monitor statuses.

All these insights were divided into four personas, which we then validated quantitatively by means of a survey and data analysis. We then designed a service blueprint per permit in various co-creation workshops. In doing so, we not only mapped out the desired customer journey, but also the underlying processes within the city.

Customer journey and service blueprint of the night licence process.

Based on the established blueprints, we created design UI flows to map out the digital process. We then supplemented these with high-level wireframes that clearly visualise the concept of the digital enterprise counter. In this way, we help Stad Sint-Niklaas make targeted estimations for the technical development of the enterprise counter.

Do you also want customer-oriented digitalisation based on real user insights? Feel free to contact us at info@knightmoves.be.