A better customer experience through customer journeys

HEMA has the ambition to put the customer at the heart of its way of working. The customer journey methodology helps to put this ambition into practice. Customer journeys visualize the customer experience in every step of the customer. The journeys provide ideas to improve the customer experience and thus strengthen the HEMA brand.

One of our service designers mapped out the customer experience in HEMA stores. This created a shared understanding of the challenges/bottlenecks and the opportunities for customers and employees. Additionally, the departments that were involved have developed a stronger bond and appreciate the value of the customer journey methodology.

We identified the criteria of the project by interviewing stakeholders and performing scoping workshops. This provided a clear perception what to focus on first and initiated cross-departmental connections.

In order to make the voice of the customer our guiding principle during the project, we conducted more than a hundred short exploratory interviews with customers in HEMA stores. In this way, we obtained insights into the themes we wanted to focus on. And discovered new relevant themes that the team had not yet envisioned. For example, that many customers perceived the online activation of the customer card and the voucher system as a 'hassle'. And the observation that many loyal customers only buy in physical stores.

With these insights, we defined personas and scenarios in three online workshops and created a customer journey. We mapped out the customer experience as well as the implications for employees and the organization. This was a good basis to render ideas during an ideation workshop that will be followed up by pilots and experiments.

HEMA was enthusiastic about our approach and wants to continue with it. We have given HEMA employees theoretical and practical training so that they can do more themselves in upcoming customer journey projects.