Clienteling for the Beauty World
UX & UI Design
How might we create a personalized shopping experience for luxury beauty buyers while creating and nurturing relationships?
COMPANY & DEPARTMENT
Company: Chalhoub Group. The Group is based in Dubai, UAE with retail networks across the GCC and Egypt.
Department: Digital Team, Beauty Vertical
DURATION
December 2018 - March 2019 (Phase 1)
PROJECT TYPE
Product design (research, UX & UI), and product management
THE CHALLENGE
Giving front-line employees a way to gather accurate data about customers to help personalize their shopping experience while giving brands a way to reach out to their customer base.
MY ROLE & METHODOLOGY USED
Role: Product designer working cross functionally with the CRM team; product manager working with our implementation partner.
Methodology: Design Thinking methodology including User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
The final product was designed on Adobe XD and Figma. Jira was used for product management and Confluence for documentation.
Problem Setting
THE FOCUS
The focus for this project was to ensure all brands are collecting clean data and have a clear understanding of their customers’ preferences.
THE REASON
All participating brands were struggling with inaccurate and incomplete data, they also weren’t sure how to capture their customers’ preferences.
PARTICIPATING BRANDS
01. Empathize
DISCOVERY WORKSHOP CONDUCTED WITH
Sales associates (frontline employees): to understand the current situation. From their insights, I drew the initial service blueprint.
Customers: to gather qualitative insights about their experience. They highlighted all the pain points they faced during recruitment and onboarding.
Brand marketers: to understand business priorities.
DATA GATHERING METHODS
Stakeholder interviews: to gather qualitative insights. Our main stakeholders were sales associates, customers, and brand managers.
Store visits & workshops: to shadow sales associates and customers as they go through the discovery and transaction process.
Data from discovery sessions and workshops were used to inform design insights.
02. Define
Sales associates
Don’t have a way to gather and share data about customers across all stores; they don’t have a holistic view of their customers.
Unaware about their customers’ likes and dislikes.
Customers
Don’t feel valued by the brand so they don’t want to share their details (lack of free samples, gift with purchases etc.)
Feeling like they always need to repeat their preferences during each store trip.
PAIN POINTS
Brand marketers/managers
Lack of accurate contact information and no clarity on customers’ preferences.
Inefficient use of resources by targeting emails and SMS campaigns to non-segmented user bases.
Problem Statement
Both sales associates and marketers want a better understanding of their customers’ preferences so they can serve them better; whereas customers don’t want to share so much information as they don’t feel valued by brands.
03. Ideate
WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES
Discovery sessions: condcuted with brand managers, marketers, and sales associates. From their pain points, I understood that the common theme was to ensure the right data is being captured about the right customer.
Shadowing on the retail floor: this was to understand how sales associates interact with their customers, so that I could design an appropriate solution.
Customer interviews and guerilla testing: this involved interacting with customers on the retail floor to understand their needs. First round of prototypes were tested with users and changes were made based on their feedback.
The Solution
CUSTOM CLIENTELING iOS APP
The app was built leveraging Salesforce tech integrating both the frontend and backend. The app was meant to be used across the entire beauty retail network, which meant both sales associates and brand marketers (i.e. the CRM team) would have access to all customer information.
The user flow on the right is the foundation of the custom clienteling iOS app.
04. Prototype & Test
Requirements gathered from the workshops and discovery sessions were used to create the first interactive prototype.
The prototype had all basic functionality and was tested on sales associates and customers (the primary and secondary users of the app).
Testing was done with sales associates and customers, both in the office and on the retail floor.
Sales associates went through the entire user flow and an A/B test was conducted with customers, after which changes were made based on their feedback.
The app was rolled out on a small scale with 3 brands and user acceptance testing (UAT) was done. Once UAT was completed, the app was rolled out in phases to stores within the UAE and then the GCC.
Final Deliverables
The custom clienteling iOS app was rolled out across the GCC after testing with sales associates and customers, and approval from brand managers and brand HQs.
