Luxury Customer Research

UX research, De Bijenkorf

The project.

When: January – March 2021
Where: De Bijenkorf
My role: Led the cross department alignment on all research
Delivered: Personas, Customer journey maps, Service Blue Print, Design Sprints

Due to stores being closed, we needed to explore how we could define a high-end experience online matching the store experience for this customer segment.

Goal: Data driven understanding of our luxury customer & business opportunities.

Methodology:

Defined the target group
Investigated online and offline de Bijenkorf luxury customers’ shopping behavior (profiling from customer insights & analytics data).
Deep dived into luxury buyers’ motivations, pains and gains with qualitative and quantitative interviews
Interviewed experts to gain expert views into customers’ behavior and business infrastructure. Store inspiration day.
Reviewed competitors, their strengths and weaknesses.
Analyzed and structured all insights in Customer Journey Map

Process

Research Process.

01.

Benchmark & Data

Defined the methodology and led the alignment of cross-department qualitative and quantitative research.

02.

Personas

Coordinated qualitative and quantitative data research that led to creating 3 customer personas.

03.

Journey Map

Highlighted all insights on a customer journey map showing the persona pain points & opportunities.

Discovery research

1. Benchmark competitors & customer data.

Learn from industry standards

I led and managed a cross – department team of various researchers exploring the luxury customer domain. I organized alignment sessions, defined the methodology, and brought together all of the questions we had regarding customers into the aligned research findings.

In order to define Personas, we wanted to understand first the current competitor landscape, then understand our current customers.

My Role: Facilitating research, defining milestones, defining research questions

We conducted the following:

Competitor analysis
Customer surveys
Google analytics review
Session cam analysis
User focus groups

2. Defined personas.

Interpret data into behavior types.

From all of the data we had gathered, I led a small brainstorm session with a fellow UX researcher where we defined 3 customer types. We kept in mind the end goal of the research we were conducting when defining the personas so that all relevant possible customer types were covered.

After the brainstorm session, I further refined the personas and created the persona visual you see here showing the key characteristics.

My role: Facilitating brainstorm, Final Persona Visual Design

3. Customer Journey Map.

Defined journeys based on the 3 personas.

In order to visualize the current pain points and opportunities, I coordinated the collection of all research into one customer journey map. My role was to define the overall template for the data for the UX researcher who then drafted the customer journey flow based on the insights. The end result was a cross-department team effort that we then shared with over 100 colleagues.

My role: research coordination, journey map template

Defined action.

I led 5 e-commerce squads and UX designers in understanding their scope based on the research findings, coordinating various Design Sprints and Service Blueprint sessions. The result was a well informed, data backed quarterly planning with ambitious ideas ready for development.