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From Transactional to Transformational: Building a Customer-Obsessed Growth Strategy

A prominent brand aiming for an ambitious sevenfold growth required a foundational shift from a product-first, purely transactional approach to a customer-first, experience-driven organisation. The project's goal was to unlock this growth potential by delivering a comprehensive, human-centred strategy. This involved defining core customer needs, mapping the complete user journey, identifying new customer cohorts, and providing the executive leadership team with the necessary tools to systematically obsess over their customers.

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my expertise

My Expertise:

As the Client Engagement Lead & Principal Experience Designer, I was responsible for simultaneously driving the strategic vision, managing high-level client executive expectations, and maintaining active involvement in hands-on research and delivery.

My core expertise demonstrated included:

  • Strategic & Client Leadership: Successfully managed diverse internal and client executive stakeholders, securing alignment on the strategic vision necessary for organisational transformation.
  • Deep Research Synthesis: Designed and executed a multi-method research strategy (workshops, customer service immersion, in-depth interviews) to synthesise qualitative human insights with quantitative business understanding.
  • System-Level Design: Created a Comprehensive Service Blueprint that clearly mapped customer touch-points alongside internal operations and systems (frontstage/backstage), identifying critical internal pain areas requiring process or technology solutions.
  • Predictive Insights: Pushed beyond simple segmentation by mapping customer purchase history against life stages to identify predictive commerce opportunities for personalised product bundles.
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the challenge

The challenge:
The brand's business objective was aggressive (7x growth), but their approach was purely transactional and product-first. The core challenge was achieving this ambitious target by fundamentally transforming the organisation's mindset and processes.

This required:

  • Bridging the Gap: Creating a comprehensive grasp of the end-to-end user journey and deep customer needs, which were previously overlooked.
  • Executive Buy-in: Providing data and artefacts (like the Service Blueprint) that could translate abstract experience problems into concrete, urgent internal process and technology priorities for executive decision-makers.
  • Unlocking Growth: Identifying new, overlooked customer cohorts and predictive opportunities to fuel the required growth trajectory.
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THE OUTCOME

The Approach:

My approach combined intensive, multi-method research to build a holistic customer view, followed by the rigorous synthesis of data into system-level planning tools.

Immersive Discovery:
We employed a multi-method research strategy, including facilitating cross-functional workshops, listening to live customer service calls for unfiltered pain points, and conducting in-depth customer interviews to uncover emotional drivers and shopping habits.

Synthesis and Prioritisation:
All findings were consolidated into a visual Customer Journey Map, highlighting friction areas across the four key stages (Discovery, Compare/Decide, Adding to Cart, Purchase). This allowed us to immediately pinpoint where effort would yield the highest return on investment (ROI).

Predictive Persona Development:
Research data was meticulously tagged and transformed into rich customer personas. Crucially, this effort uncovered new, untapped customer cohorts the brand had previously overlooked.

The Service Blueprint:
I synthesised all insights into a Comprehensive Service Blueprint. I know Service Design is a mindset shift and not an artefact and many blueprints just end up collecting dust. However, visuals help explain the problems to teams and execs and help us clearly see the problems. This artefact provided the executive team with a single, holistic view of the customer experience against the internal operational reality, proving the necessity for process and technology over just interface changes.

Co-Creation:
I facilitated co-creation workshops following the blueprint to collaboratively brainstorm practical solutions for the high-priority problems identified.

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THE OUTCOME

The Outcome:
The project delivered a transformational shift in the organisation's focus, equipping the leadership with the strategic tools required to meet their aggressive growth targets.

Growth Strategy

Provided the organisation with a clear, data-backed roadmap to confidently pursue and achieve the ambitious 7x growth target.

New Customer Insights

Uncovered new, previously overlooked customer cohorts and identified predictive commerce opportunities by mapping life stages against purchase history.

Organisational Shift

The life-stages insights and data-driven personas were presented directly to the executive leadership team, successfully shifting their thinking from a product-first to a customer-obsessed approach.

Systemis Clarity

The Service Blueprint successfully pinpointed critical internal pain areas demanding process and technology improvements, demonstrating that solutions required system-level change beyond simple interface tweaks.