UX Strategy - Customer Engagement Services

Overview

The Customer Engagement Services (CES) team enables and protects customer accounts and identity, powering loyalty and self-service, mitigating transaction fraud, and facilitating a 360° view of the customer. In a nutshell, CES is essential to “knowing the individual customer.”

CES's backend capabilities in collecting, managing, and turning data into useful insights is why it plays a critical role in building meaningful relationships between Best Buy and Best Buy customers.

Identification + Rewards + Fraud Mitigation + Core Data + Connected Data + Enriched Data =
Customer Engagement Services (CES)

Challenges

While the team provides a powerful platform enabling customer experience and employee tools across the enterprise, the experience is up to each team to refine and implement. Most of the priorities to this point have put CES in the position of supporting other teams’ short-term goals. Quick fixes became the norm for the CES’ product development, resulting in a fragmented customer experience.

CES product leaders needed to engage in cross-team conversations to drive end-to-end experience solutions, starting with the Pont of Sale (POS) team.   

My Roles

It was a 4-month project from identifying the need from the leadership to the final share-out. I was responsible for uncovering and addressing leadership needs. To do so:

• I was the point of contact initiating CX conversations between Customer Engagement Services and Point of Sale product and design leads.

• I worked with the store experience design lead to understand priorities across product and design stakeholders.

• I collaborated with design and product partners to formalize user stories and the storyboard to narrate the journey from the employee and the customer’s lens.

• I socialized the workshop’s expected outcomes, deliverables, and timelines.

• I facilitated multi-day cross-team working sessions.

• I coached the designer to produce the final UX shareout.

• I took measures to ensure the UX strategy deck was visible and accessible to anyone in the organization.

• I wrapped up the project by hosting several UX shareouts.

scope & Goals

Stakeholder interviews suggested the CES product leader was facing obstacles in building common goals. Leadership has a talking deck containing 60+ slides of data and insights about the team’s capabilities. Yet the narrative around the “how” and the “why” to bridge that conversation with other teams was lacking. The primary goal for this project was to create a document to summarize broad and complex backend capabilities into relevant and user-centric problems to establish cross-team alignments.

To maximize the impact of this work, I set a timeline so the work will be able to influence priorities for the upcoming quarterly planning. Additionally, we were actively working with the Point of Sale team on an account hygiene initiative. A secondary goal was to include the partnering teams in the creation of the UX strategy.

The Workshop

The product and design leadership were on board with the approach. I planned a workshop to include core team members and stakeholders from the Customer Engagement Services and the Point of Sale teams - designers, researchers, product managers, data scientists, engineer leads, and leaders from the product, design, and engineering were invited. Because of the size of the group, it’s important for workshop participants to first establish trust and a level of domain knowledge. The workshop was therefore broken into multiple days to ensure participants were informed and empowered to take part in the exercise.

Leveraging the Best Buy customer store visit story, participants co-created the customer journey from both the store employee and the customer's perspectives. Subject experts from both sides of the experience provided helpful insights and domain knowledge that enabled the working group to focus on the right moments and problems to solve.

By the 3rd session, a list of actionable items addressing business and customer problems was prioritized for product, engineering, design, and research to act upon.

The UX Strategy

Storyboard creation

With the co-created customer journey, we can bring customer voices into the conversation through storytelling. I took this opportunity to coach the designer in storyboarding techniques.

Knowing the target audience

There are two types of audiences the UX strategy was tailored for:

• Audience 1 - anyone within the Best Buy organization.

• Audience 2 - Point of Sale core team members and stakeholders

By focusing on the two audience types, the strategy deck can be used for onboarding new team members, serving as a conversation starter for cross-team collaboration, and designing guidelines for the POS and CES teams working together in the coming quarter.

Shareout & Visibility

One challenge that often gets overlooked when it comes to strategy work is visibility. No matter how well thought out the work is, if it’s not in the hands of the right party, it’s not making an impact. Part of my strategy work is to ensure the final strategy is shared with workshop participants, teams, and individuals who would benefit from the UX strategy work. I also put together a series of shareout sessions with stakeholders, partners, and other product and design teams. The deck is uploaded to wiki and other shared spaces for easy access.

Sampled Strategy Deck

the Deliverable & Beyond

The Customer Engagement Services UX Strategy was presented during the Q1 FY23 planning fair. Over the past few years, we have seen an uptick in enterprise-level priorities around improving customer data. The deck continued to be leveraged throughout the years in product and design documentation.