St. Louis-based, B2B startup dedicated to improving customer experiences through data-driven, spatial analytics
Messy restrooms are bad for business. Nearly 4 out of 5 customers say that they won’t return to a place if they find that the restroom is dirty, and 50% of them will spread the word to family and friends. Facility managers and cleaning staff usually don’t know something is wrong until it’s too late. That’s where Qstodian comes in. Its unique trio of products combines real-time, anonymous customer feedback with people-counting technology. With Qstodian, cleaning staff are alerted of maintenance issues before they become a problem for business.
Qstodian, which was started by the CheckTheQ team, was created in response to some of the insights we gained while building our wait time tracking product. I worked full-time with them to build a new brand, products, marketing materials (and more) from the ground up.
My Role
Branding
Product Design
Website Design
Presentation Decks
Brand Identity
Since Qstodian is the child company of CheckTheQ and their target markets are the same, we wanted the two brands to feel like they were related to each other. For Qstodian, everything was made to feel simple, clean, practical and modern. It was important that the brand was general enough to be able to grow with the company and that its messaging focused on improving customer experiences across every type of business.
Logo
Although Qstodian was designed to be used in restrooms, we didn’t want the logo to look like a cleaning product, or anything related to the custodial arts. The diamond / sparkle shape was chosen as a symbol of the value that cleanliness can bring to a business. The friendly sans serif is approachable and appeals to a wide audience.
Brand Elements & Photo Styles
The diamond / sparkle shape from the logo plays a central role throughout the entire brand. It’s used to shape space, as a background pattern, and its concave edges dictate the curved corners of photos and holding shapes.
Photography does a lot of the heavy lifting in setting the light and optimistic tone of the brand.
Colors
Qstodian’s color palette is a combination of blue and grays, which were chosen to create a feeling of stability, trust, and cleanliness. White is used as the predominant background color to give a sense of brightness and space.
Products
Restroom management technologies have been around for a while, but the Qstodian team saw an opportunity to build on existing solutions, as well improve facility staff’s ability to monitor restroom usage and receive user feedback through specially designed, cloud-based software.
I worked with the Qstodian team to design their two restroom user feedback products, as well as a client-facing dashboard where Qstodian’s customers can view feedback in real time, set alerts for facility staff, and generate trend reports to gain a better understanding of ongoing issues in each restroom.
QSend
Clients who subscribe to QSend receive a set of mirror decals for each restroom in their facility, each with its own unique phone number. Restroom users use this number to anonymously send feedback about their experience via text message. The decals are printed on an industrial-grade material that is water and chemical resistant.
Once a text has been sent it automatically goes to the Qstodian Dashboard, which sends an alert to facility staff so that they can fix the problem.
QSelect
Clients who subscribe to QSelect receive a tablet device for each restroom in their facility, which are designed to be mounted to the wall. Restroom users can use the tablet to rate their experience as “Poor”, “Average”, or “Excellent”. If they indicate that they’ve had a poor experience, they are taken to a new screen that gives them a set of common issues that occur in the restroom.
All user feedback is automatically sent to the Qstodian Dashboard. If the feedback is “poor”, the dashboard sends an alert to facility staff that there’s a problem.
Qstodian Dashboard
All restroom user feedback, as well as footfall data from QTotal, lives on the Qstodian client-facing dashboard, where it can be viewed in real-time.
Facility managers can also use the dashboard to view historical data about each restroom from the Trends page, as well as set up alerts and manage their staff from the Control Center.