Creating an integrated customer experience vision
Aesop life has been a series of templates, built and rebuilt over time, applied to fine tune first the salon, then the products, and finally the stores. As the experience and design lead, I was involved with leading a stream of work to bring Aesop's omni-channel vision to life. I worked with cross-functional teams to unpack, explore and ideate Aesops future state customer experience vision.
Due to a Non Disclosure Agreement I can’t show the project in detail. The following is a helicopter view of the process and sample artefacts.
Service design
Workshop facilitation
Service blueprint
Prototyping
Web design & development
The challenge
For many customers, Aesop's store experience will be the most tangible expression of the brand and its promise. With the emphasis on digital due to the pandemic and with high expectations in place, the challenge was to capture the spirit of ‘intelligent interactions’ beyond our stores and across all touchpoints.
A flag in the sand
To bring the strategy to life, I facilitated and series of workshops to gather domain knowledge from leaders and products teams across the world. At the heart of our process was a transparent, iterative and collaborative approach to set the stage for a successful cross functional partnership.
With an intimate knowledge of the customer and ambitions of the company as inspiration, we crafted several short stories to articulate a vision of our customer's journey in the future.
These were communicated through short films and a micro-site. The experience visions helped to align and drive our teams to deliver better-designed products, services and memorable experiences. We crafted the speculation by asking—if we did a good job, how might we improve our customer's lives?
Taking a global view
To ensure the customer was at the centre of the experience vision, I lead a research study to interview Signature Store Mangers from across the world. This helped to ensure an omni-channel experience that would be localised and relevant.
Rapid Prototyping
To push the boundaries of current thinking and gain CEO buying, I created native prototypes to communicate the quality of the experience for certain value propositions.
Since launching the out of the box e-commerce experience has been rolled out to three international regions and has enabled over $500k of online trade.
