A small team was established within John Lewis explore the upholstery purchasing process across stores and online.
The objective was to gather all existing data and research, develop a plan for collecting additional data to fill any gaps in understanding, and prepare for the 2024 upholstery season by recommending updates across the service based on findings.
Gather And Organise Existing Information
- Document the competitor landscape;
- Recover existing internal documents and presentations;
- Research external trade insights;
- Gather relevant Google and internal analytics;
- Analyse customer feedback forms;
- Analyse customer service operator notes;
- Collate past internal research studies;
The information was converted into pain points covering the end to end offline and online service referencing the origin of the information.
Some of the team spent a day at the John Lewis store in Milton Keynes to talk to sales associates about problems that may hinder their sales process and interview customers about their purchase journey.
Since it was already known that the customer journey typically included online and offline services, an area of particular interest for us was the handover between the two channels.
A series of workshops were conducted with relevant stakeholders from across the partnership, and including partners from diverse areas of the business in order to gather a range of different perspectives. This included buyers, online and offline product managers, sales partners, and retail space planners.
In the workshops, the pain points were discussed and prioritised based on the assumed importance to the customer against confidence in the validity of the pain points. It was important to discuss validity of the pain points, since the breadth of the research could signal false or minor problems. The points were grouped into clusters of service types.
Examples of these clusters are
- Fabric attributes and details
- Imagery and visualisation
- Assembly and recycling
- Customer Communication
Having established the priority areas in the top right segment of this exercise, a series of "How Might We" questions were created.
In a new workshop, these questions were answered in timed sessions by a fresh group of stakeholders. Contributers were encouraged to include any and all thoughts, whether good or bad.
At the end of the session, all contributors discussed and voted on the most popular solutions to be pursued.
This was followed by an additional timed session for the participants to add their thoughts and suggestions to most highly voted suggestions raised in the first round.
The outcomes of the research and the workshops was a collection of suggestions for improvements and hypotheses to action in the next phase of lo-fi prototypes.
The findings also helped identify which in-depth research was needed to address some of the unresolved questions.