Clienteling - Service design

The company

A makeup and beauty retailer founder by the number 1 make up artist in the world. Working to break ground within the beauty industry, using innovative technology for customers and make up artists.

The Goal

To transform and enhance the existing relationships between customers and Makeup Artists using data to create personalised experiences and encourage a longer term loyalty to the brand.

The customer problem

As a customer, there is no easy way for me to either record recommendations and tips from Makeup Artists, nor keep a record of the products used on me during appointments with Makeup Artists.

The USERS

  • Primary: Makeup Artists working in our stores across; The UK, The US, and Hong Kong.

  • Secondary: Customers entering our stores in the UK, US and Hong Kong.

The timeframe

5 months, with the initial launch being linked to a store opening in LA.

Discovery

Discovery was predominantly focused in three main areas:

  1. Understanding more about our primary user, Charlotte Tilbury Makeup Artists

  2. Understanding the head office objectives around enhancing in-store experience, improving efficiencies and capturing data in a safe and secure manner

  3. Gaining a clear view of existing technology in the retail space


1 Makeup Artists at Charlotte Tilbury

  • Ethnographic studies in our stores in the US and UK to give insight into “a day in the life of” a Makeup Artist

  • Focus groups with Makeup Artists in The US to gain an in-depth view of their day to day activities, their use of customer and in store data, the existing manual processes, and their interactions with customers

  • Surveys were sent to Makeup Artists globally to validate the day to day routine, the pain points during their day to day and how they could see their work day being enhanced; whether through efficiencies, or training, or just fun

  • Observation sessions in our stores in the UK to give us an understanding of the makeover journey as is, for both Makeup Artists and Customers.

Understanding the existing journey for both customers and Makeup Artists, as well as the the pain points during their experiences, helped us to continue to form assumptions about how we might execute a viable and useful solution.

Our main focus for users initially was on our Makeup Aritsts, however it was important not to ignore our secondary users, the Charlotte Tilbury customer. So in addition to these three approaches we also spoke with customers visiting our stores to understand where their perceived value was right now and what they would improve.

2 Head office objectives

  • Requirements gathering sessions held with commercial and data teams to ensure everyone had a consistent and coherent understanding of the problems we were trying to solve

  • Interview sessions with the global training team to gain a rounded picture of the approach to makeup artistry at Charlotte Tilbury.


3 Existing technology in the retail space

Whilst there isn’t a huge amount of ‘useful’ in-store tech within retail at the moment, there has been a huge focus in recent years on omni-channel shopping behaviours and gaining a single view of the customer across all interactions. As a result, several retailers in the UK are using their bricks and mortal stores to encourage customers to share data for enhanced experiences. Where possible our aim was to understand the operating models and the experience from both the customer side and the store associate side.


Technical considerations

Discovery also required a deep dive into the mechanics of our existing systems; stock systems, pricing systems, product feeds, existing in-store point of sale, email service providers and content management systems. An understanding of the capabilities of each and every one of these systems was key to creating an experience that actually worked. We were conscious we didn’t necessarily have the neatest data feeds, no the most integrated systems. Knowing our limitations upfront enabled more efficient problem solving.

Synthesis and identifying the MVP

Our discovery validated several key areas to focus on for MVP:

  • Makeup Artists: A need to digitalise their existing client black books, to enhance communication and the content of those comms, be able to encourage purchase remotely and be able to store client information about makeovers to enable an enhanced personalised experience

  • Business: There is a key need to integrate data collection and build relationships between customers and Makeup Artists, due to the known increase in lifetime value of customers who shop multi-channel and purchase more than once

  • Customers: A need to digitalise their TilburyTablet – a paper form recording the makeup used on them during makeovers so they could recall with ease.

Now we had a full understanding of the existing journey and a view of what was possible from a technical perspective, we were able to draw out a proposed flow for the experience. Understanding all the possible ways to solve the problem and the connections between each solution. From this point we could narrow down our MVP focus.

 

Design, test and build

Due to limited resource internally, the product manger and I, through a formal RFP process, chose a 3rd party supplier to execute our first form of Clienteling.

Testing scenarios with Makeup Artists in store

Given our need to go with a 3rd party, the scope for design freedom was significantly reduced. My focus then learnt towards research and testing to understand the key areas we needed to customise prior to launch as well as a longer term roadmap for continued iteration and a larger scale customisation.


Process for testing:

  • Prototyping experience through collaboration with 3rd party engineers and designers

  • Running usability tests with Makeup Artists in store

  • Running mock customer appointments to observe the user flow


Outcomes saw us focus on customising the consultation/appointment flow. Transforming this process into a digital one has the biggest potential to impact commercials in both a positive and negative way. If the flow was not intuitive for our Makeup Artists then an appointment would take more time, reducing the number of overall appointment per day per makeup artists. We modelled an allowance of an additional 5 minutes to be added to the current experience without having a negative financial impact.


Next steps

Test, learn and iterate.

  • Observations, usability tests and interviews with Makeup Artists in our LA store to understand impact of rollout and form new assumptions to validate for further improvement

  • Continuous feedback loop built into the app for Makeup Artists to answer polls or give open feedback about their experiences

  • A pilot to run in the UK in free standing and concession stores to form initial assumptions around building out a concession model as well as the differences in behaviour by region

  • Integrate Clienteling into the Makeup Artistry training at Charlotte Tilbury to gauge new starters’ approach to the product and to get breath of user type between existing and new users.