Google Hardware Popup Store
Role
Lead Facilitator and Customer Experience Designer
Timeframe
Ongoing for two years
Client
30+ stakeholders from 5+ cross-functional teams
Goal
Design the best possible customer experience for the Google Hardware Popup Stores
Retail is changing continuously to become more experiential in order to evoke the feeling and benefits a customer would have when owning a product. As a leader in this space, the Retail Marketing team at Google has launched a Retail Popup store, with a primary focus on experience, every year for three years.
The goal for these Popup stores has been to allow customers to step into what their world would look like if it was fueled by the impressive hardware product lineup, including the Pixel, Pixelbook, Nest Hub, Google Home and more, which are all powered by the Google Assistant.
My challenge as the team's Customer Experience and Service Designer was to tie in the product experiences to the path to purchase, as well as ensure a seamless and smooth holistic, end-to-end experience throughout the Popup store narrative.
© 9to5google.com
Through this service design approach of understanding the customer experience just as much as the employee experience and the ins and outs of the entire operation, we were able to create the most successful Popup store yet, with the highest customer engagement, sales, and raving reviews to date.
We also uncovered a major pain point: the lack of product support available at the Popup stores was straining the experience from all sides. By finding this, we were able to promote the inclusion of product support for the top issues recognized in Popups from previous years and consequently ensure more customer satisfaction and less returns.
We also achieved a successful Grab'n'Go section which we had previously determined was imperative in order to avoid the formation of queues for customers who wanted to go directly to make a purchase.
In order to address the challenge of creating a cohesive in-store experience that ties in the narratives of all the diverse product experiences, my team and I designed multiple design thinking workshops throughout the year leading up to the launch of the Popup.
First set of workshops
Tools & Methods
Key Insights
- —The path to purchase was often clogged by long queues and the product experiences felt fragmented
- —Discovered that the lack of customer support in past years' Popup stores was a big pain point for customers AND for employees
Second set of workshops
Tools & Methods
Key Insights
- —Create a theme and narrative that carries throughout all product experiences, tying them together
- —Train Popup store agents on the top customer support issues from previous years
- —Implement more Grab'n'Go options for purchases to alleviate long queue formations
Third set of workshops
Tools & Methods
Key Insights
- —Equip cross-functional teams with a 'workshop in a box' for independent sessions
- —More mobile POS would be needed to support an efficient path to purchase
© Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
