CX Strategy, Design and Execution

How do you stay relevant to customers in 29 different countries whilst maintaining consistency?

.Objective

As one of our longest standing clients, our partnership with Brother sees us doing just that.

Working with Brother's European HQ, we are the design partner to the team responsible for deploying changes to the Sitecore platform across Europe.

Absurd's remit ranges from Pan-EU research to personalisation planning, UI design and user testing. 

.Solution

Our long-term relationship with Brother has seen us work across many areas of their service ecosystem; including self-service support, product registration, search and navigation experiences, through to B2B lead generation with their corporate service offering.

A core element of the ecosystem we recently designed, was the introduction of commerce functionality to the pan-European platform, enabling customers to buy directly from Brother online for the first time, A significant shift in proposition, which posed a number of challenges; Traditionally Brother products have been sold through resellers and distributors. As one of their largest revenue channels, the core function of the site was, and still is, to drive traffic to these third parties - Brother cannot neglect this channel and therefore needed to balance the D2C proposition carefully against stockist referrals; Different countries across Europe have different pricing policies, recycling schemes and shipment methods, so all of these nuances needed to be considered as part of the design; User testing proved that customers were having difficulties finding products, so the IA needed to be considered.

.Outcome

The resulting solution included a new mega nav solution, redesigned product pages and a checkout process fit for 29 territories. Through ongoing CRO and user testing, we are now supporting Brother through a program of optimisation. Every solution we design for Brother is grounded in research for both discovery and validating our ideas. The challenge is ensuring all markets are represented in our testing activities and that we are able to understand the unique behaviours of each market. For example, we learnt that Germans have less tendacy to engage with images Sourcing participants is a major element in our testing activities and finding the right individuals across all territories can be a challenge, but through using Brother's own databases and local recruitment agents we are able to ensure we are generating the right insights across the markets. Facilitating user testing has also had it's challenges operating across 29 territories, but through the use of remote systems we have been able to generate lab-level insights.