Out of respect for our friends at Kmart, we can't show you the end result just yet because the project is still ongoing, but we can explain the process we took and tools we used to reach a solution.
Australian retailer Kmart engaged Sheda to help improve their in store Customer Experience. By leveraging Human Centred and Service Design principles with our innovation toolkit, Sheda helped mitigate risk and unlocked innovative insights throughout the process to position a successful solution for Kmart’s customers and the business.
To truly define the opportunities for innovation, Sheda looked for 'pain points' in the current process and where technology and experience design could bring about a benefit for both the customer and the business. These pains 'problems' created a roadmap for multiple hypothetical solutions through technology via persona development, user journey mapping, internal staff process reviews and stakeholder workshops.
To understand the task of innovating a solution, Sheda first had to understand the current state of the business, its customers and the current solutions in place. We used a number of tools to collect information about the business from the perspective of the staff and customers.
We needed to gather data on the current state of the business to compare/validate changes to the process through our experiments. The metrics we sought to capture were current level of customer satisfaction, current solution costs, and current profit and revenue streams for the solution.
Sheda provided five working solutions to help alleviate the problems identified, which would open up new sales opportunities and increase customer satisfaction at Kmart. We then spoke to customers, staff and stakeholders about these solutions to gain comprehensive feedback on each one.
Problem solution interviews with our hypothesis solutions we interviewed customers and staff to get an understanding of the proposed solutions were viable for the people involved. From these interviews we identified a hierarchy of the most important solutions based on Kmart's customer and staff feedback.
Modelling real experiments
From the most well received solutions we modelled actual experiments to run in-store with staff and customers based on our hypothesis. We used a method of experimentation and Prototyping.
Data acquisition
Acquiring data for each experiment.During the experimentation stage we used the same methods of data collection as we did during the benchmarking process. We did this to identify the differences our solution made over the current solution.
Data comparison
Comparing data to experiment data and benchmark data.We compared the difference in data to identify and model the success of our experiments. This also gave us a great insight into a solution and how it could be implemented.
What did we learn?We learned that over our hypothesised solution there were multiple solutions that could be implemented to increase customer satisfaction and identify positive profit opportunities for the business. We learnt that the solution was important, but what was most important was how that solution was implemented for both staff and customers.
"It was great to work with the team. They were 100% committed to our project and very focused on delivering a good outcome at the end. The team understood our values and strategic positioning from the beginning, which made everything easier and enjoyable. It would be great to work together again in the future."
