AEO Customer Journey

Objective

While the idea of ecommerce can appear to be straightforward, how customers navigate this flow can be more complex. By researching and documenting how customers shop, we can understand better how to support their needs across a journey.

Outcome

Building a baseline for general customer shopping behavior provided our teams a firm baseline to focus efforts around and give a shared understanding for business partners to understand base customer needs and expectations.

My Role

• Worked with peers to create the various research plans outlined below including synthesis of output.

• Aid in completion of journey map, presentation preparation, and cross functional readouts of the map and insights.

Project Goals:

• Identify and document any new customer pain points, unmet needs or moments of delight that require journey map visibility

• Document the pain points or unmet needs we have solved or are actively solving to ensure we are focusing on untapped opportunities

• Identify the key moments of truth that are critical drivers for deeper emotional connections with our brands and lead to long-lasting loyalty

• Establish an as-is baseline for our customers emotional state and feelings as they move across their journeys and experience key moments of truth

• Prioritize the key moments of truth we need to focus on improving and which we need to focus on celebrating

• Re-evaluate and update key customer-centered strategic pillars to ensure they align with our customers’ current needs and expectations

To achieve the goals, we needed to perform multi-modal research efforts looking to address the following

• What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of our customer’s experiences along the journey? What are our customer’s attitudes and perceptions of their experience along various points in their journey? How does this impact their perception of the brand?

• What is the emotional arc of their journey today? When do the highs and lows occur?

• What are our customers’ motivations throughout the journey?

• What experiences do customers expect in order to feel delighted in their journey?

• Where do they experience the most friction or pain points that cause them to abandon their process?

• What are obstacles that must be removed for customers to be successful and delighted in the journey?

• How is the journey different between customer groups/segments?

• What are the key moments of truth that matter most to our customers and drive long-term loyalty?

• Who is not consuming our products currently and how might they be different from our current customers? What barriers are these segments experiencing that keep them from becoming AE customers?

• Why do customers rely on AE products? How do AE products make them feel & why? What attributes make them their favorite (bra, jeans, etc.)?

Research Efforts

Customer Journaling

Leveraging online tools like DScout, we gave customers “shopping missions” to understand how they shop end to end

These customers then documented their shopping journey (from browse to first wear) providing us insights into their joys and pains.

• Seeing CX over time

• In-the moment reactions

• Authenticity

• Post-purchase insights

In Home Interviews

To understand how shopping behaviors begin, we ran multiple in-home interviews to get after

• Understanding customer’s backstory, identity, & goals

• Observing where customer is in shopping process

• Seeing how AEO coexists with other brands in their life

• Visual observations

Outcome of Research

3 Archetypes were formed based on this research along with the core journey shown at the top of the page. These gave us a path to communicate with business partners using both the map itself, but also videos and aggregated research feedback