Building Materials Retailer Customer Journeys

Roles: User Experience

Shift7 Digital (formerly Siteworx)

 A major building materials company engaged with Shift7 Digital (formerly Siteworx) for a discovery phase to truly understand their customers and their end-to-end journey with their family of building products–namely composite decking materials. After the four major personas were identified, I created visual journey maps highlighting the customer's path and major pain points.

Four Main Personas

It was our client's goal to make awareness and trust in their products grow in all areas of their customer base. While they had long catered to the B2B space, engaging more with building contractors and home improvement stores like Lowes and Home Depot, the company noticed a gap in awareness of their products amongst direct end-customers.

Coming out of the initial phases of the engagement, basing our insights on previous research done by the company, stakeholder interviews, analytics, and our own competitive analysis, we landed on four key personas:

• General Homeowner - one who knows nothing about decks, and is most likely employing contractor help.

• Do-It-Yourselfer - one who knows a lot about home improvement, and would rather complete the project on his/her own.

• General Contractor - a jack of all trades home improvement professional who focuses on anything for the house.

• Deck Contractor - a one-stop-shop deck implementation specialist. He/she spends a lot of time in the market and knows materials well.

Each persona has a different level of home improvement or general building expertise, as well as comfort levels with technology. Knowing this, it was easier to identify how each customer type made decisions within their distinct buying journeys.

Laying Out The Journeys

For each of the personas, there were four distinct points along their building products buying journey that could be evaluated.

1. Trigger - What is causing the customer to buy building materials?

2. Search - What does the customer do to find the building materials he/she needs?

3. Evaluate - How does the customer weigh the options of products out there?

4. Decide - What goes into the customer's final choice and beyond?

Each journey shows what challenges the customer can go through both online and offline during their buying journey. This comprehensive view of the journeys highlights the business opportunities that our client could take on, both for general business process improvements but also for digital touch points with their customer base.

All of our user experience strategy and work helped inform a greater roadmap for the engagement with our client. We highlighted initiatives that the company could take from a overall business perspective, and helped pinpoint the digital touch points that we could help them improve or create to enhance the experience of all their customer types.