Problem Definition
- Offering helpful advice to customers is part of Coolblue’s DNA and a key pillar of its strategy. Coolblue stores excel at providing face-to-face advice to customers, which results in higher conversion and customer satisfaction.
- We observed that store employees struggled to use the website to offer accessories to customers. This meant missed opportunities for cross-sell and lower customer satisfaction as they walk out of the store without everything they need.
- Employees juggled between multiple tabs open, had to navigate through several pages each time, and often offered suboptimal or incompatible accessories to customers.
- The accessory offers page of our regular customer journey did not work for store employees, because it does not offer them powerful tools such as filtering and searching.
Research Techniques
In-situ Observations
We observed customer-employee interactions in a Coolblue store.
User Interviews
We interviewed several Coolblue employees about their experience when offering relevant accessories to a customer’s main product.
Data Analysis
We compared accessories sold in our website vs. those sold in stores to understand the dimension of the problem.
Usability Testing
We tested our prototypes with customer employees to capture feedback and improve our design.
Design Solution
When setting our direction we defined 3 main design goals:
Speed and focus: Reducing the time it takes for employees to find and offer accessories is crucial for our customer experience.
Supporting conversations: Interactions in the store are all about conversations between employees and customers. Our design needs to fit in with the way employees interact with customers.
Guide employees: Employees often need help in offering the best accessories to customers. Our solution should guide them to the most relevant accessories to offer.
Starting point
Our new flow begins in the Product page, where now we have abutton with the Call-to-Action “Complete product”, to encourage store employees to follow this path.
A New Page
The “Complete your product” page is then presented. We establish a connection between the main product and the accessories thanks to the summary block
Accessory Tabs
The new page revolves around the concept of “accessory tabs”. These provide easy access to multiple accessories within a single page. These tabs accomplish two things...
1. Guide employees on what to offer
They provide immediate recommendations and guidance to employees by surfacing the most relevant accessories to offer for that main product. This is connected to our cross-sell data.
2. Supporting conversations
Each tab provides a space to have separate conversations about each accessory or service.
Filtering the assortment
The entire assortment for an accessory type can be viewed filtered, something that was not previously possible in our previous accessories page.
Browsing more accessories
Employees can open more tabs for other accessory types, if it’s relevant to the conversation.
Browsing more accessories
In this panel, employees can view all types of accessories available and compatible for that product. They can also quickly add a specific accessory by typing in the product ID or scanning the product in store.
Adding accessories to the cart
When a customer is convinced, employees can simply add the accessory to the cart with the click of a button.