Life Technologies Ecommerce Transformation speaker session at Sterling Connection 2009
For the Sterling Customer Connection 2009 event, I was asked to co-present the Ecommerce transformation initiative at Life Technologies. As it turned out due to last minute exigencies, Christian Wip, the Director E-Commerce at Life Technologies was unable to make it to the event and I became the sole presenter.
The Life Technologies Ecommerce initiative aimed at replacing their ecommerce web based sales channel with a new customer centric and technologically scalable solution based on Sterling MCS.The idea of the presentation was to share key insights, learnings and best practices we put in place to enable this successful transformation.
One of the innovative and customer centric approaches we used to capture user feedback was the 'voice of customer'. Through various techniques such as focused group studies, surveys, usability studies etc, Life Technologies had pulled together a list of 'voices' from customers. This included their expectation of "knowing my order and doing them right" to "guide me", "make things clear" etc. These were then translated into actionable requirements such as providing better order status/tracking/history information, minimizing the number of clicks in the checkout process etc.
Another key innovation we focused on was the process to work out the ultimate user experience for the end consumer. My experience with typical Ecommerce implementations is that a lot of time and energy is spent in putting together the user experience. It is one of the areas where a significant overlap occurs between the UX focused marketing teams and the technology enablers. This is not always the most productive or 'smooth' meeting of the minds. Gaps tend to emerge later on in the development and testing processes, because usability testing may bring about significant changes as also 'understandings' of features offered varies. This is further complicated by the demands of a packaged application to keep processes consistent and repeatable thus implying a 'reduction' in flexibility. We were able to overcome some of these challenges by using the Infosys user centered design methodology. This involved up front usability studies and walkthroughs of existing UX flows to allow all stakeholders to contribute their ideas and thoughts. These were then converted into 'to be' flows and wireframes with each element of functionality and data mapped out on the detailed wireframes. These wireframes e also took into account 'out of box' package features to retain high upgradeability. Clickable prototypes and visual designs made these screens real to all the stake holders. These visual designs after sign off were converted into code or html which were then used by the development team to integrate with the backend process flows.
You can find out more about my session here. Also Christian Wip, the eCommerce Director from Life Technologies talks about this initiative and its execution through a video.
