RETAIL DISCOVERY

“We put a lot on the retail representatives to remember.” Stakeholder

 
 

PROBLEM LANDSCAPE

AT&T doesn’t have a retail-focused understanding of current customer friction points, journeys, or processes for the omnichannel Shop & Purchase experience. With a clearer picture of the retail landscape, including common discounts and promotions, we’re better positioned to define our opportunities to improve the customer and rep experience.

Business data tells us that while ‘digital first’ is priority, the largest revenue stream comes from the AT&T Retail store, where we have an opportunity to make a large impact on customers’ experiences.

HOW MIGHT WE

Understand the early stages of the Wireless Shop & Purchase experience, with a focus on specific promotions and discounts:
Tiered offers, Trade-in, Next Up, and No promo.

MY ROLE

A 12-week discovery project was kicked off with a multidisciplinary team. My role was to lead the design, working closely with an associate director and two designers.

 

RESEARCH

Our researcher created a plan and I participated by writing questions for the stakeholder and retail staff interviews, taking notes, and observing in-store interviews with retail representatives and store managers.

  • Talked to 16 stakeholders within the retail ecosystem to understand their roles and current initiatives.

  • 5 Retail representatives and 3 Assistant store managers

  • Retail visit and rep interview

  • Visited DFW retail stores to observe and interview store representatives regarding their experience.

  • Customer survey (403)

  • Collect customers' responses about overall perception of stores after recent visits

 

WHAT WAS LEARNED

Store representatives manage multiple systems to meet customer needs, often switching between them in ways that disrupt the natural flow of conversation.

The lack of standardized terminology for discounts across the company exposes customers to varied language about saving money.

Reps use their expertise to ensure a positive customer experience, employing workarounds when systems fail, simplifying jargon, and restarting transactions if necessary. They are adept at navigating different platforms, even if it means entering customer information more than once.

 

ARTIFACTS

We took our research learnings and built artifacts to serve as jumping off points for future retail research, and presented our findings to leadership.

Ecosystem of the store representative tools

 

Face-to-face engagement

The Rep engages customer in conversation to understand customer needs and priorities. Depending on what is learned from the conversation will determine the starting point in the Rep’s interface.

Interface
The interface building blocks are made up of linear and non-linear tasks. The non-linear tasks should have the capability to happen at anytime throughout the interface flow to accommodate the rep/customer conversation while the linear tasks are dependent on preceding tasks

 

RECOMMENDATIONS & OUTCOME

Along with our design and research artifacts, I collaborated with our team to present out next steps and additional work needed. The recommendations included the following:

  • Resource connection
    We need additional information to know what currently exists for site maps, research and roadmaps from other teams, as well as existing communication touchpoints so we aren’t working in a silo. We also need to know what is continued to be built in existing retail platform vs what is moving to Salesforce.

  • More research is needed
    Customer/rep tree testing can help carve out future flow expectations while qualitative rep/agent interviews could bring insights into retail conversations where the interface needs to pivot.

  • Exploration
    Proposal to create a conceptual, non-linear retail sales flow with the guidance of Reps to test for insights.
    This artifact is a companion piece to the ecosystem and retail building blocks artifacts. They work together to give a full understanding of all the moving pieces within the retail Shop & Purchase experience.

  • Experience strategy proposal

    • A guiding retail experience playbook to align teams across AT&T

    • An enterprise-wide retail experience strategy will inform future projects. The experience strategy would take existing design principles and business policy decisions into consideration.

      Example content within the strategy may include:
      - Objectives and success criteria
      - Storyboards detailing customer narrative
      - Experience principles
      - Target experience and how to achieve it

Opportunities

These opportunities are our biggest chances to get wireless retail Shop & Purchase right.

  • Explain the trade-in process better beginning-to-end

  • Increase bi-directional communication among Rep’s tools

  • Tear down unexpected barriers: from last minute credit checks to slow instore Wi-Fi.

  • Standardize the language and phrasing used across AT&T