Retail Customer Experience
Video Shopping
As the pandemic began and lockdowns started, we were faced with a problem: how do we deliver the same store experience to customers now that they're shopping from home?
Role
As the sole experience designer for this project, I conducted user research to understand user needs and pain points, created user personas and journey maps, and developed high-fidelity designs. I collaborated with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment and consistency throughout the design process, and iterated on designs based on user feedback and data analysis.
Initial Design: September 2020 - October 2020
Initial Launch: October 2020
Re-design: March 2021 - August 2021
Re-launch: September 2021
Outcomes
Projected to represent approximately 14% of the domestic online revenue for the fiscal year
Highest conversion rate among digital sales channels (four times higher than chat and voice)
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic caused lockdowns which led to many people shifting to remote work and education. This created a demand for new technology to facilitate these ways of working. As the largest electronics retailer in the U.S., this company had to adapt to the changing shopping behaviors.
In late 2020 we launched a pilot to explore video as a sales channel, but with the shift to primarily online shopping, we quickly realized that our existing solution wasn't scalable.
Approach
To kick off this project, I partnered with a researcher who would tackle industry research to gain insights on how the pandemic was shifting shopping behaviors while I focused on the pilot to understand how shoppers were using video and identify pain points with the existing experience. We also spoke with employees who interacted with customers on a daily basis to gain insight into their perspectives on the existing platform.
I combined all of our research to create customer mindsets that the working team could rally around. We then focused on optimizing the experience for the pre-purchase mindsets.
I created a video call experience that was fully integrated into our other chat experiences which made it possible to:
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Seamlessly transition between pure text chat and video
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Browse products while on a call
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View screen share from employees for additional shopping assistance
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See a personalized product demo for customer specific use cases
A new ops team was also stood up to tackle issues we encountered in the pilot. Which created a dedicated space to handle video calls also allowed us to address issues that popped up in the store pilot:
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Customers shopping in store would interrupt employees on video chats to ask questions
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The ambient noise in stores made it difficult to hear employees
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Store Wi-Fi wasn't stable and would occasionally drop in the middle of conversations
Outcomes
The result was the creation of a virtual store that could provide customers with personalized service and expertise from the comfort and safety of their own homes.
The updated experience led to:
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Increased customer satisfaction
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Customers with different abilities or those who are hesitant to shop in store found video calls very useful, felt cared for, and valued
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Conversion rate 4x higher than other digital channels like chat or voice
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Roughly 14% of online domestic revenue
