Elevating e-Commerce — TORI SIGNORELLI

Elevating e-Commerce: Redefining Global CX at Farfetch

Company: Farfetch, Global Luxury Platform

Role: Senior Global Director, Service Design

Focus: CX Strategy, Business Transformation, New Product & Service Launch, UX Design, Service Design, Consumer Journey Management

Customer: B2C

Industry: Tech/ eCommerce Saas Platform/ Digital Marketplace

As customer expectations continue to evolve, It’s not enough to deliver excellence. Customers expect services that make them feel valued and empowered. They want to be surprised and delighted and each customer has their own set of expectations, preferences and baseline for making that happen. For a business, that means offering comprehensive suites of services that can cater to those unique needs. In e-commerce, that means striking the perfect balance between digital access and human touch for each individual customer.

By leveraging our team’s outside-in, birds-eye view of the customer experience, my Service Design team led a collaborative effort that tapped the strengths of the total organization’s people and technology. The result was a suite of personalized, proactive styling and concierge services that consistently deliver on the promise of luxury.

A Post-Pandemic CX Strategy

Business Challenge:

The Pandemic had created a positive shift to online shopping, but had put a massive strain on logistics and supply chain networks that higher business costs. These global challenges put our biggest experience differentiators at risk for the first time in company history, resulting in a dip in NPS and customer sentiment scores.

Redesign our service offering to redefine and elevate our global customer experience in the shifting global landscape to hold position as the unique online destination for luxury goods.

Approach:

Research:

The cross-functional research surfaced insights into unmet customer needs along the shopping journey, as well as (inefficiencies or pain points) in service processes. This established clear opportunity for proactive service and personalization while also validating the need for data consolidation, operational process improvement and robotic process automation (RPA).

Leveraging the customer needs and opportunity areas discovered in the research, strategic pillars were built and communicated to key stakeholders, informing cascading strategies and the business at large. This initiated the start of early-stage sizing and roadmap planning.

Once the strategy was defined, I began aligning goals and negotiating priorities with global stakeholders, selling the vision for change, running early ideation sessions, and building business cases to negotiate CX roadmap priorities with Product Management/ Engineering.

Strategic Pillars & Key Strategic Initiatives:

Most departments across the business were accustomed to working independently under the direction of their own executive leader. Team-members had high enthusiasm for bringing ideas to the table, but were focused on their own team’s success criteria. The collaboration established in the strategy phase quickly deteriorated in the design phase.

Service Design & Journey Management offered a path forward. Because the team’s focus was outside in with a 360 degree view of the customer experience, we were able to share a view from a higher altitude perspective than teams usually saw. They could now see all service channels and how their part of the journey fit with others, the customer point of view became a great neutralizer and teams could rally around a single source of truth with a common goal. We were able to move ahead in a structured, systematic way with the Conversational Commerce program.

Designing the Offering:

Outcome Overview:

The initial lack of collaboration resulted in a slew of ideas popping up from multiple departments. At first glance the services overlapped and were disconnected. By bringing in an outside-in perspective, Service Designers worked with cross-functional teams to expand and specify service propositions across a unique suite of services to align with the strategic CX goals and ensure a clear, easy-to-access service journey to meet customer needs and expectations.

The outcome was a suite of white-glove services tested and launched as part of Conversational Commerce that leveraged the strengths of each team to help customers gain styling advice, access hard-to-find products, and manage their purchasing journey with high confidence and minimal friction. The results showed increased loyalty program engagement, higher repurchase rates and increased revenue.

Select Customer Experience Outcomes:

Expansion of service (chat) channels, enabling asynchronous communication - meeting preferences across a broader customer demographic.

Clear & unique service propositions giving customers easier and faster access to our full suite of services and products - with more personalized recommendations and support.

5 new membership Incentives across tiers in the form of products and services. Getting them what they want and need more quickly and giving a real reason to be loyal shoppers.

Select Program Results: