Amazon Post Purchase Experiences

Company:

Amazon

Role:

UX Design & Research Lead

• Design: Structured brainstorming workshops; design concepting; low fidelity design; high fidelity design; interactive prototyping

• Research: Generative research; usability research; research data analysis

About this project:

The customer lifecycle has become an important part of the retail shopping experience. After purchasing an expensive item, the customer should not feel abandoned by the retailer. There are opportunities to provide shoppers with post-purchase support, which in turn increase overall satisfaction in the product, retailer, and manufacturer. Fostering customer loyalty goes beyond the initial purchase transaction. It requires developing and supporting an ongoing relationship with the customer by providing support and follow-up services as needed. I focused my customer lifecycle work around consumer electronics shopping experiences such as warranties, device upgrade/replacement cycles, trade-in facilitation, self-service device setup, order returns, and merchandising of complementary accessories and software.

The challenge:

Post purchase experiences are very challenging to design, build, and measure.

The product design required threading together existing experiences that lived in different parts of the retail experience: consolidating experiences across the site while providing just-in-time offerings and education. A successful design would improve customer satisfaction while saving on operational costs. 

Our technology stack for adding to cart and checkout are heavily scrutinized. Adding additional stops along the shopping journey meant that we would have to build a bespoke experience, which required an engineering commitment to long-term maintenance. For example, the digital and physical purchase and return pipelines were separate and resulted in disjointed customer experiences. Consolidating the returns of physical and digital fulfillment items required significant engineering work and stakeholder buy-in.

As a longitudinal experience, this product would be measured through increased customer lifetime value, repeat business, higher rates of satisfaction, increased usage of other Amazon retail services, reduced return rates, reduced customer acquisition costs, and reduced customer service contacts.

Solution:

For the initial pilot, I focused on the post-purchase warranties experience. Warranties are part of the core offerings of the consumer electronics shopping experience, and would yield trackable metrics through existing internal tools.

In order to arrive at an optimal pilot, it required:

• Understanding the business: Working with business and product to better understand the customer problem. Running structured design workshops to identify opportunities in the customer experience.

• Design research: Competitive analysis; Observational shop along study that focused on how customers sought out warranty purchases after buying their device, and how to troubleshoot common device issues.

• Engineering consultation: Better understand the technology constraints based on existing infrastructure

• Experience design: Create design concepts through low fidelity sketching, wireframe creation, and high fidelity prototyping. These were used to keep stakeholders and engineers in the loop for feedback and scoping purposes. Our MVP focused on purchase mechanisms for warranties after the customer has purchased their device, communication related to their digital warranty, customer education, and combined self-service return flows. Secondary design priorities included introducing tech support through Amazon or the manufacturer of the device and the merchandising of complementary products and services.

Results:

• The initial phase of the customer lifecycle support helped reduce customer contacts from 0.73% to 0.55%.
• The post-purchase email resulted in a 20% sales lift.
• This experience is currently being adopted by other areas of the business, such as vendor services, buyer/seller experiences, and smart home retail.

Mobile designs:

Additional process artifacts: