Designing for multiple layers of Customer

Digitising the tenant / landlord relationship through the creation (from concept to delivery) of a product that allowed stronger relationships and greater capability to exist between Head Office, Centre Manangement, Retail Stores and Retailer Head Office; allowing for a significant upturn in Retailer CX as-well as Operational efficiencies and significant cost-benefit.

Identifying the problem?

There was significant strain on the relationship between Retailers and Head Office due to the significant amount of manual processes that needed humans. When you have 68 shopping centres and ~8k tenants across the portfolio, retailers were becoming increasingly frustrated at how challenging it was to perform simple tasks without having to rely on humans.

Industry benchmarking and competitor analysis when it came to tenants and landlords; and understanding what technology might exist in the market today.
Large numbers of customer (retail staff and retail head office) interviews to get their perspective on the day-to-day operational challenges of being a tenant.
Large numbers of customer (Head Office and Centre Management) interviews to get their perspective on the day-to-day operational challenges of being a land lord or an operator of a centre.
By working as a UX vertical across the business; several workshops were conducted with senior representation across all relevant business units (plus retail guests) to formalise a roadmap for the product, work through the cadence for testing, a plan for roll-out etc. so that the project could be formed.
As a Design function, we took all the prior knowledge gathered and begun collaborating with development on the concept which later would go on to become Vicinity Connect.
For each and every feature, we'd worked with internal stakeholders to identify relevant retailers and centres from which to facilitate customer interviews and user testing sessions on the design concepts. This information would be formally gathered, synthesised and socialised.
Design and Development always worked hand-in-hand throughout the project, ensuring timelines were adhered to and that there was no ambiguity on the desired outcome.
Every feature was released as a mini-pilot program to a pre-determined sub-set of retailers so that we could track the uptake, progress, usage and success (and areas for improvement) before any decision was made to scale.
In order to achieve operational efficiency, continue to drive cost out of the business and continue down a path of an improved CX - as each feature was scaled and rolled out to the entire portfolio; a new feature was being developed and worked on.

Iteration… 🙌

As the team scaled Vicinity Connect and implemented new features, we continued to learn from our customers (retailers), continued to test, take feedback and improve the UX / UI to ensure our customers needs were being met on a daily basis.

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Shifting customer sentiment

How do you go about shifting years of negative customer sentiment? We built out a program layered in trust and transparency, as-well as putting the processes in place to handle, triage and act upon customer feedback; changing hearts and minds both in the business as-well as for new and existing shoppers.

Identifying the opportunity…

We had been leveraging and paying a 3rd party vendor to access feedback that users where sporadically leaving - so that we could own and respond to it. However, it was just ‘there, and existed’ without much thought or strategy behind it. Not only was there an operational cost, but it was counterproductive for the business given it was actually showing the online shopping community that we didn’t place value on customer feedback.

Identify the accounts and capability from 3rd party vendors that we were already paying to access; as-well as understand all the integration points that had been (and hadn't been) set-up.
We needed to understand how, when and why customers were leaving feedback so that we could map out all the touch-points and marry that back to our internal business processes.
We needed to show both existing as-well as potential new customers that we placed genuine value on their feedback, and that it was welcomed by making it prominent and part of key customer journeys, whether they be discovery or transactional journeys.
We set up a cadence of testing our engagement model, centred around the ways in which we communicated and the timings of when we communicated and requested customer feedback.
Working with the business, we stood up a Service Design Blueprint to understand all the various touch-points and data as mentioned above 👆so that we could adjust our own internal processes to not only respond to customers feedback, but turn it into improved customer service processes as-well as being able to successfully triage feedback and turn it into tangible delivery focussed outcomes.
Continuous iteration and monitoring of the program was critical to ensure it could scale across our multiple businesses - resulting in significant uplift in customer sentiment.

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CMS Migration

Migrating 68 consumer facing websites, housed across multiple back-end platforms into a single Content Management System; enabling Head Office staff, as-well as Centre Management staff seamless ability to maintain their own consumer facing assets.

Business 🤝 Customer 🤝

Across a portfolio of digital assets (68) there was an opportunity to significantly increase business efficiency and lower operating costs; as-well as centralise the code, platforms and Design System(s), translating to not only an improved employee experience, but also an enhanced end-user experience.

As you do in all key projects, getting the right people in the 'room' and having a proper kick-off meant that we could really understand some of the real challenges in maintaining, staffing, documenting & training for multiple legacy CMS systems.
We had multiple layers of customer that needed to be interviewed and shadowed over a period of time to truly understand the varying ways of day-to-day use across all platforms. This involved customer testing and sessions with Head Office staff and Centre Management Office staff across a variety of disciplines.
The organisation had never run any customer testing across the portfolio of digital assets; and given the opportunity for centralisation we needed to understand consumer behaviour in order to inform some of our decision making.
Part of moving to a new CMS brought about an opportunity to create single-set of components, robust enough to be able to cater for the many needs across the multiple brands, sites & various user types.
14 Different consumer facing brands, none of which factored in web; so there was the need to run a piece of work with internal Brand & Marketing teams to re-position and also spin up a web-version of our branding guidelines.
Given we were re-aligning our 'Digital' brands to be more web friendly, we also undertook a programme of work to make enhancements to the brand to factor in AA Accessibility (AAA where possible).
TBC
Given the various types of back-end user(s) across the business, we organised multiple roadshows, ride-alongs and centre specific sessions for training; as-well as the creation of the usability documentation in order to achieve a successful delivery of the program.

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Co-founding from Creation > Launch

A founding member of the team; the process of taking an idea and literal scribbles on paper into concept design, ideation and delivery - whilst providing the design work and prototypes to investors, contributing to Australia’s largest ever capital raise (pre-product).

Career Highlight

To have taken and contributed to the ideas of the founding team, then created the design work and prototypes to aid in securing Australia’s largest ever funding round for a start-up pre-launch is something very special to me.

There was a gap in the market for one centralised location for online shoppers to come to that gave them every piece of information they could need to not only shop the product; but also to know in real time where they could purchase it for the absolute cheapest price point.
Many rounds of desk research were conducted to understand the market of product comparison, price matching, community driven forums and eCommerce to understand the features that shoppers and deal hunters were utilising (and used too).
Many iterations of designs were created, tested and iterated on for the initial build. There were also several presentations and prototypes to be developed for our Sales team; as-well as for our founding team to engage with new potential investors.
As the product started to come together and as we conducted further research, we continued to iterate and enhance the desired capability of the features.
Customer Testing sessions were continually run as our design work came together to ensure we were getting some impartial perspectives and some diversity of thought from outside our founding team in order to ensure we were meeting consumers where they were; not where we wanted them to be.
There were alot of big ideas for some very robust features; which needed alot of co-creation and collaboration with our data team to ensure we could deliver the capability to the customers as expected.
My Design work and Prototypes were what was presented in the pitch to CBA who invested $30million AUD prior to us having the fully built product, let alone a launched business.
There was a significant amount of design work to be done in preparation for the launch. Not only did the site have to be ready; but for PR, marketing and other above-the-line activities.
Going from a start-up environment to being integrated into the CBA eco-system presented the need for flexibility and adaptability in my design leadership given the two very different businesses. It also presented a wonderful opportunity for co-creation as we were designing for each-others digital assets.
There was a huge amount of 'secret sauce' that required significant amounts of collaboration & co-creation in order to achieve what we set out to put in-front of customers at the scale and level of sophistication required.