Synopsis:
With a team of 5 including myself, we were given the challenge of improving a company's virtual service and purchasing experience. We picked a local skateboarding company with the intention of working with them and to learn something new about a sport we never got into.
This local shop uses 100% Canadian Maple to create custom skateboards for the local boarders. At the time of our research, the majority of sales went to other local skateboarding shops. However, it was apparent that local skateboards also wanted to get their hands on such quality boards, and learn about the process of making these at the same time. Our goal was to create a portal for these individuals who want to purchase and learn how a board is made.
Aligning customer and business values will ensure that the customers come back, but if the business does not continue its service after the initial sale, customer retention falls, and they will more than likely align with another competitor that offers a better service.
![By providing services throughout the product life-cycle [Initial sale, product usage, and product renewal], customers will likely stay with the current business/service. The two models displayed above sums up our approach when designing our website …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c611f38a9ab952b4e0f093b/1550124698393-82TMF5LY3NK517KOK2KD/Customer_Retention_Model-02.png)
By providing services throughout the product life-cycle [Initial sale, product usage, and product renewal], customers will likely stay with the current business/service. The two models displayed above sums up our approach when designing our website for this project.
Learning Outcomes:
This was a valuable project that we did. Unfortunately, the company that we were hoping to work with did not see the potential of this project, we were left with making a few assumptions here and there about their business models and overall service and purchasing experience. Nonetheless, we continued with our user research and found valuable information that we could used to our advantage. The importance of user research and prototyping was further reinforced in this project.
