The first thing I decided to do to get started in developing the customer experience was to study the current customer experience. I wanted to understand why our customers buy from us and what kind of challenges they might be having when using our service.
To study this, I have been doing both going through existing information we have on our customers and doing new research.
Spending so much time on just getting started has been helpful. I have had time to form ideas on what it really is we are trying to do and what are the different parts of it. It has taken sorting through thousands of post-its on a virtual whiteboard but I am starting to have the big picture of the customer experience and where we have most room for improvement.
The hardest thing is to turn the abstract and complex into something simple. What I am trying to do is to break the complex down into simple parts that I can work on.
My current model of our service has four parts:
- Activation
- Finding the products
- Getting the products
- Loyalty
Activation refers to how our customers are activated to come shop from us. Currently we are using emails and ads to activate our customers to come to our store but it would be even better if the trigger was “internal” for the customer. In other words, just like seeing your fridge getting worryingly empty triggers in you the need to go to your local grocery store, it would be good for us to be the first thought when you see your dry foods running out or something like that.
Finding the products refers to a challenge that is quite unique to our business. We are an online store with a product selection changing nearly every week so the customer can’t regularly buy the same products or even know what we are selling when they come to our site. This is a due to the fact that we sell whatever the logistic companies can’t sell anywhere else. We need to be great at helping our customers find the products they are interested in from the 1000+ possibly unfamiliar products in our store. (Fun fact: many customers browse through every single one of the products on our list, taking up to 30 minutes)
With getting the products I refer to the stage where our customers are getting the products, so paying for them, tracking them, receiving them, and then using them. One challenge we have in this area is that our packages are often heavy to carry as people buy large amounts of products at one time.
Finally, loyalty is simply what makes customers come back. From my perspective this refers to whatever we can do to make our customers want to come back. We have a loyalty program but I would also include personalisation into this category. In this kind of business making customers come back is important as getting new customers is more expensive than retaining the old ones.
Those are four core functions of our service that are part of the experience of every single customer journey and they also sum up what our service is about. The business is an interface between suppliers and consumers that makes it easy for consumers to find and get products that would otherwise end up wasted. To make this possible, we need to activate the customers to buy from us and to make the business viable, we need to turn the customers loyal.
Naturally, there are a number of other factors that need to be taken in to account as well
Likely this model will evolve over time but for now it makes sense for me.
Seeing the forest for the trees
It would be possible to spend years building more and more features and focusing on small details without ever stopping to think what the underlying goals are. The result of working that way would be a mess where the pieces do not fit together and don’t create a coherent experience. If you would like an example, think of almost any public service.
Working the other way, starting from the big picture and working down to the details makes a lot more sense. That way also the details make sense and are all a meaningful part of the complete experience. That’s why it is worth taking the time to sort through 2825 post-its to see the patterns.
In a few months I will start working with others from our team on putting together a vision for where we are going with the customer experience. This model will be helpful for that work.