DECISION: How do we address people’s experience around a business process that can’t change?
(Improving Size and Fit shopping experience to deter returns and drive growth)
Background:
Low NPS for people who were returning. Looked into returns for cause and saw that size and fit was a reason - Sought to improve the experience with size and fit.
ROLE : Head of CX and UX for Direct to Consumer Ecommerce platform. Oversee a team that includes Voice of the Consumer Analysts and UX Researchers.
STAKEHOLDERS: Product Owners responsible for the “Browse” consumer flow. Merchandisers in Ecommerce Operations. Product Designers from various lines of business.
TIMELINE: 18 Months total.
Challenge:
Decisions about how to address consumer frustrations around the return process needed to be made by the direct to consumer channel for an outdoor apparel company. Consumers were frustrated with paying for return shipping. The business model did not support offering free shipping to consumers.
Methods:
I approached this by partnering with data scientists to see if we would be able to determine the root cause of returns. We learned consumers were returning garments because the fit was not perfect. I decided to take an experiment approach to exploring how we might improve the size and fit experience of consumers. I partnered with product managers, site operations, data science, customer service, and fulfillment to build a research architecture that would support incremental learning. Through a variety of discovery experiments (including surveys, prototype testing, and A/B tests, my team of researchers and analysts were able to prioritize insights and begin working directly with UX designers and product owners to test POC changes that could be implemented.
Results:
We learned that size and fit is intensely personal and consumers have many different preferences for getting the right size and fit product when they are shopping online. Our work showed the value of investing time and energy into optimizing existing experience with the platform and some vendor implementations. We were able to influence the prioritization of investment in research and testing of “virtual try on” technologies as a way to help consumers get the right fit and reduce returns.