industry
Electronics retail industry
year
2021-2023
TOOLS & METHODS
Workshop facilitation, user surveys,
competitor analysis,
usability testing, UI redesign
WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO SOLVE?
As a team, we realised that we need to investigate the problem in multiple channels. In the following months, I investigated customers' behaviour at a few touchpoints in their omnichannel journey with the help of different research methods.
CUSTOMER INTERACTION WITH THE WEB PAGE - interviews
I conducted 20+ remote interviews with end customers in Sweden and Denmark to have an insight in their negative experience(s) of browsing and contacting customer support via web page. Our goal was to find out:
• Pain points in their journey
• Usage of chatbot
• Preferred method of contacting customer service
• Reasons of contacting customer service
Image on the left is an example of how I led the interview. In other interviews there was often also the product owner and at least one developer.
CuSTOMER INTERACTION WITH WEB PAGE - CUSTOMER SURVEYS
Customers were able to give thier feedback in form of short answers via user surveys. I informed my product team on a weekly basis about current status of ratings collected with Hotjar for customer service pages for all four countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland). Our goal was to:
• Detect technical issues
• Most common reasons for low feedback
• See ratings of subpages in customer service sites
Here is an example of a graph representing Danish customer responses in a period of a month.
CO-LISTENINGs AT CUSTOMER CALL CENTRE
I frequently joined customer calls in customer care centre to see how customers interact with agents and to see how their requests get handled. Our goal was to:
• Explore user journey of the customer care centre agent
• Reveal (new) customer pain points
• Investigate most frequent problems of the customers
On the left there's a screenshot of the screen that the customer support agent was looking at while handling customer's request.
We have discovered plenty room for improvement - the following points were most frequent:
1) Customers want to be frequently informed about delays in their delivery status
2) Customers wanted to wait less time in the phone line for a customer care agent. More than 10 minutes is not acceptable
3) Customers wanted to have more visible information about price matchings, returns and delivery option
4) Customers would feel more in control if they were able to look for reasons for delay themselves, rather than calling or e-mailing customer support
5) Customers are often calling to ask questions that can be found on the webpage - in most cases they couldn't find it themselves.
OUR GOAL
Based on all accumulated data, I set up a half-day workshop with the team to go over findings and to prioritise our future work. The goal was to prioritise what are we going to work on next, how will we do it and to get input from business stakeholders (from our product owner).
Together we voted on prioritising the most needed actions and created a future roadmap.
OUTCOME OF THE WORKSHOP
We continued with the:
• Redesign of content on customer support pages
• Creating the self-service of repair status
The existing page was for customers confusing, as they didn't find the e-mail address at all (only the contact number), the help posts were written in a too generic way and were often surprised by the long waiting time via phone call.
In the first version we prioritised the search function and self-service products: repair status tracking, chatbot, gift card balance, price match.
Below we offered most common articles. Customers were primarily interested in repair and support option, payment options, opening time of shops and click & download option.
If customers weren't able to help themselves with the option offered above the fold, we provided them with three options of contacting us with displayed (approximate) waiting times.
Repair status web app was a self service tool that we implemented in parallel with the customer pages.
It's biggest value is that the user was able to see what was happening with the repaired item at all times. Later, we had also designed additional features, such as requesting a refund right from the app and contacting third party insurance company (if needed).
The percentage of customers using the repair status service in IVR, who didn't need to talk to an agent was 78%, enabling these customers to help themselves and save time.
The cost saving from reduced calls was invested to increase the answering rate. Customer care centre was able to answer 82% of calls from Jan-Aug 2022 vs. 57% of calls in Jan-Aug 2021, increasing customer satisfaction.
