REDEFINITION AND REDESIGN OF CLAIM PROCESS FOR IKEA
How to change angry "I won't ever buy from you" into a customer satisfaction and loyalty?
What problem are we trying to solve?
Turning the moment of disappointment from the the need of making a claim and from the claim process to a neutral or pleasantly surprising experience.
Design question
How to change disappointment from the need of making a claim and from going through the claim process to a neutral or pleasantly surprising claim experience?
DISCOVERY PHASE
Research included: customer safari at variety of retails stores, call center, website; shadowing and interview with customer service and retail stores employees; interviews with IKEA and competitor’s customers; listening to real customer claim calls; needs analysis as CAWI; desk research; benchmarks; trend analysis; interviews with small enterprises or one person businesses offering services around furniture, as semblance and repair.
Research findings can be aggregated into the following categories:
COMFORT AND MATCHING
Convenience is not only an advantage - it is the basic principle of good experience and good customer service. Customers are requesting to have a possibility to contact customer service via their preffered communication channel. They expect to receive information about their claim status via the same channel as they have contacted IKEA (unless stated differently).
COHERENT EXPERIENCE
Shopping at IKEA is easy. Customers can return purchased products for 365 days from the purchase. Ease is expected as well from claim process. Any experienced difficulty with reaching out to or communicating with customer service makes already distressed customer dissatisfied.
AGILITY / FLEXIBILITY / CAPACITY TO PROCESS CHANGES
Business should use tools and analysis ways that enable proactive response, e.g. flagging clients who have already called customer service twice or have unfunctional furniture that can't be used (e.g. lack of mattress or bad to sleep on). Such customers with "high importance" flag should be prioritized. Currently employees have three systems to work with during the conversation with the customer which extends the time needed to service one client.
THE SERVICE DOES NOT END ON PURCHASE
Promise made by the brand and the level of service implementation builds expectations towards complaint process. If returning or claiming faulty product in customer perception is easy, because it is possible 365 days a year, customers assume that the complaint process will be just as "painless" as well.
Service complaints, such as assembly or delivery, are the most problematic and cause the most negative emotions.
Customers must monitor the progress of the complaint themselves - there is no system of automatic notifications of its status.
TIME
Delivery and repair service dates are inconvenient and can be very distant. Often time, deliveries are not on time or do not appear at all. Customers are taking days off from work to receive delivery that never arrives.
Complaints are handled by different people which generates unnecessary need to explain the issue multiple times.
Customers complain about waiting time for customer service in the retail shops as well as on customer service phone line.
Customers would like to use their waiting time so that they could, without losing their place in the queue, go for example to eat something or look at the store.
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Rahm Emanuel
DEFINITION PHASE
Claim as an opportunity of building a new relationship with the customer, developing this relationship, not losing it.
Description to come...
All the documentation including research findings, low and high fidelity mockup, value proposition and service blueprints have been handed over to customer.
Some of the ideas could have been seen as implemented already in 2019 and 2020.
With our proposed solution, we wanted to have a real impact on:
•The level of customer satisfaction resulting from the individual approach to customer needs.
•To increase customer decision-making by enabling selection of delivery dates and methods, compensation forms, service team, etc.
•For uninterrupted use of IKEA products (in case of product defects and errors on the part of IKEA employees).
•The ability to choose your preferred service providers - the so-called Uberization of websites(option to choose repairs at local service providers)
Some pictures from the project
