Add a Happy Ending:
Re-imagining the Sam’s Club Exit Experience
Project Overview
Client
Sam’s Club
Challenge
Collaborate with Sam’s Club’s innovation and UX team to uncover the pain points during their exit process and propose innovative strategies and solutions to reimagine the experience.
My Role
Lead user researcher and UX designer, responsible for the final deliverable (A team of 22 student led by two UNT professors worked together on user research and new concepts, ran workshop with Sam’s club’s UX team )
Deliverables(My contributions)
Stakeholder’s map(Mural🔗)
Empathy Immersion(Mural🔗)
Service blueprint and pain points (Mural🔗)
Ideations & User need statements (Mural🔗)
Storyboards (Mural🔗)
Deliverable slides for clients
Process
Three stakeholders impacted by one experience: shoppers, staffs and the business.
1.Frame Opportunities
Imagine this:
You've just finished a big shopping trip, eager to head home and relax, only to be met with a long checkout queue. After paying, there's another line for receipt checking, an awkward and unnecessary delay.
This scenario is not just a customer annoyance but also a major concern for our client, Sam's Club. They aim to enhance customer experience and reduce losses, while also improving their employees' work environment.
This challenge presents us with an opportunity: How can we ensure a delightful end to a shopping trip, leaving customers with a positive lasting impression, while simultaneously reducing Sam's Club’s inventory shrinkage* and easing staff workload?
Following our initial meeting with Sam's Club, we set clear project goals:
Ensure a quick and pleasant checkout and exit experience for shoppers.
Minimize friction for exit associates in customer service.
Help Sam's Club significantly reduce in-store shrinkage during checkout and exit processes.
*Shrinkage refers to inventory loss due to factors like item damage, cashier errors, shoplifting, and internal theft.
Empathetically research and understand stakeholder
02. Understand Stakeholders
Our class acted as a big research team brainstormed what research was needed to reveal helpful insights. The class split into 5 research teams worked on:
• Renewed and validated customer personas* to reveal key design drivers
• Stakeholder map to identify key stakeholders and how they should collaborate
• Interview with store stakeholders to understand their journeys
• Site visits and empathy immersion activities produced photo journals to empathize with stakeholders
For a problem as complex as service design, understanding the needs and pain points of stakeholders is the only way to find the roles and moments where influence can be exerted. We mapped the stakeholders with our client.
As our project was carried out during the epidemic, Sam's Club also launched many services online and in combination with digital products as other businesses did, and in this process, I was personally concerned about the feelings and experiences of the elderly community when using these services, as well as the issue of usability. So I conducted several studies with one of my researchers, including an online app usage study and an offline self-checkout experience study, and generated the Empathy Immersion then mapped out the process as a Photo Journal, and finally turned into a Service Blueprint which I had the opportunity to serve as one of the co-facilitators.
Takeaways from Research
Customer Habits: Always need to find a fast lane and avoid traffic jams at exit
Scan & Go and online shoppers merge into one line, slowing down the exit process
Members with paper receipts are slower at exit than those with the receipt on their phone.
During the pandemic, club members visit for a few items, not for monthly or weekly stock
Accessibility Issue: Bad navigation at checkout and in the App
Users need to easily find an open register
Checkout should be safe, enjoyable, and accessible
Scan & Go needs better navigation for coupons, an in-store map, and other features
Mapping the entire service journey and finding right touchpoint.
03. Find Touchpoints
From entry to departure, a complex web of interactions occurs between customers, club associates, managers, technology, and corporate entities. By meticulously charting these hidden touchpoints, we've laid a vital groundwork for inventive brainstorming. This approach allows us to explore front-of-house opportunities from varied angles and develop comprehensive strategies.
Later, as co-facilitators, our team led a workshop with our client. The goal was to confirm the pain points we identified and to prioritize opportunities for creative brainstorming. The extensive research conducted by our class was distilled into key insights, focusing on two main processes: Scan&Go and Self-Checkout.
From restocking to a smart shop
04. Define New Concept
We then split into smaller groups for concept generation. My team of five selected the top 3 pain points to tackle. During our brainstorming session, we generated 30 significant ideas, each from five distinct perspectives. From these, we crafted 7 user need statements, considering both customer and associate viewpoints. Together, we created 20 storyboards, ultimately categorizing them into 12 unique solutions. You can see the ideation process here.
Our project has led to the development of three progressive concepts. Designed for short, medium, and long-term implementation, these concepts aim to reduce customer losses, enhance efficiency, and significantly improve the overall experience.
Overall, our goal is to enhance operational efficiency and minimize losses by creating a store and merchandise management system that is data-driven and facilitates a seamless experience from customer shopping and store management to the logistics system.
Balancing Big Ideas with Immediate Solutions
Takeaway
We aimed to find the right mix between bold, forward-thinking ideas and practical, immediate solutions. This balance is crucial—big ideas pave the way for long-term expansion, but it's the smaller, carefully implemented solutions that can drive quick, positive changes.
Team
Yiran Zhu, Krystal Hsiung, Jingwen Wang, Gauri Kinshuk, Alex Quinn