Proxy Pickup at DSG
Proxy pickup is projected to earn DSG 10+ million dollars in revenue over the next year.This cross functional feature allows customers to designate another person to pickup their order where they would otherwise abandon. When our principal designer left the company, this key enterprise initiative was placed in my court to run with – a huge responsibility!
Lead UX Designer and Researcher
6 Balanced Product Teams
Omni Fulfillment Stakeholder Teams
Our customers are busy people with busy lives. Although customers are well intentioned to follow through with picking up when placing their order for store pickup, we know that 30% of orders are abandoned after placement simply because life gets in the way sometimes! This is a problem because customers don't get the products they want to pickup and DSG doesn't realize that sale.
Proxy pickup aims to chip away at that 30% order abandon rate by offering athletes the chance to designate another person to pickup for them when they place the order at checkout. This solution provides our customers the ability to be more flexible and plan for the unexpected.
Since MVP launch in August 2021, this feature has allowed over 40,000 more orders to get picked up by a designated proxy person. This feature is projected to impact over 10 million dollars of orders in the next year. That's a whole lot of orders fulfilled in a flexible way!
How might we reduce abandons and make pickup more convenient for customers?
What's the true benefit of proxy?
Customer Satisfaction is a metric that's tracked through surveys on relevant touch points in the customer experience journey at DSG. I started off understanding the problem of abandons and the possible proxy solution by reviewing CSAT verbatims and survey data with our business partners to leverage. We pulled out and organized verbatims based on what impact we could make if we solved them.
Proxy is not a new feature in the retail landscape but is almost tablestakes based on verbatims from customers. Looking at our direct and indirect competition was the next logical step to learn what we should DO, what our DONT'S were and what could be good for business in our MVP experience.
Our exististing in store application for fulfilling orders through pickup and ship from store is called Omnimobile. In order to understand user expectations with proxy related needs, I visited a handful of stores to discuss with them about where they would expect to see proxy information in the app.
At this point our product teams collaborated to kickoff design in our respective areas and produce a requirements document for MVP and align on the go to market plan for the feature. We were going to launch our MVP to the Golf Galaxy chain (80 stores) and run a research series to understand new pain points and opportunities to smooth out before launching to 800+ DSG locations across the country.
My main focus was ensuring our check in website which my team owns is accessible by a proxy person and that our teammates in the store can see all necessary information including proxy name and information when needed.
I leveraged the learnings from my teammate interviews and adapted our existing screens to feature proxy information when required. Proxy information is mainly needed at delivery and when checking for Identification when pickups are not systematically checked through our online check in.
Before pushing the new feature to golfgalaxy.com, the larger proxy project team met to review the developed experience with the tech org to align on the launch and iterative research plan to learn and iterate before launching to the DSG chain.
Click around the Figma prototype to get a better understanding of user interactions on their respective devices as well as their corresponding real world actions.
At this point my role was far from over! I was tasked with running the iteration research to improve the Proxy experience for not only my team's touchpoints, but the entire end to end experience. Here's what I did:
Once launched to Golf Galaxy ( GG ), I ran an interview series for 5 golf galaxy athletes on UserTesting.com where we wanted to uncover any quick wins and pain points in the proxy experience.
I surveyed all 83 Golf Galaxy stores about where proxy information was lacking, display issues and more. These findings were quickly iterated on and developed by my team.
As the designer in charge or iteration research, I was also tasked with organizing the iterations with other teams. This included presenting research findings and aligning on next steps.
Scroll Left/Right on the images below to view my first iteration deck 👉👉
Based on our all of our findings shown above, we narrowed our focus into 4 areas for necessary improvement that we fixed before launch to the additional 800 DICK's Sporting Goods stores in the chain.
1. Update Customer Check in Page with verbiage about why we're not checking IDs for systematic check in.
2. Update Hold Slip so the proxy and purchaser name is more scannable.
3. Include a search option on Orders screen that functions with both purchaser and proxy last name input.
4. Proxy Pickup check in notification.
Once launched to the DSG chain, I ran an additional series of 15 more interviews focusing on 3 core user flows with UserTesting. Please reach out to me to learn more about this research. Let's take a look at the final customer facing experience.
At checkout we're only asking for the name and email of the addtional pickup person. This allows us to customize their emails and communicate about necessary updates on the order.
Research Opportunity:
Based on Interviews post-launch at DSG, customers want to have a better understanding what communication their proxy will recieve. Our current emails convey this, but checkout will promote better confidince right at designation.
Overall, the emails were clear and thorough. Purchasers felt that their designated pickup person was recieving just the right amount of communication.
Research Opportunity:
One of the subsets of customers we interviewed post-launch was the "Extend" customer. These are customers who requested more time on their order. After interviewing athletes, they had expected their pickup person to get an update when they took a tangential order action.
CheckIn was a simple process for both purchasers and proxies who used their email. With the launch of proxy, we needed to ensure standard compliance in stores with checking identification if the customer/proxy did not check in via their email link.
Research Opportunity:
The biggest concern we heard from customers was the concern they had about their order because their ID wasn't checked. It wasn't understood that whever an order is checked in online, we wouldn't check their ID. My team has since included new verbiage about not checking IDs to ease customer tensions and concerns.
When a customer/proxy arrive to pickup their order our teammates mark the order as picked up and both the customer and proxy recieve a communication via email. Our interviewees appreciated this because it could prevent extra trips and or miscommunication.
What I learned:
Building rapport is a skill that takes practice, but is so critical to getting the best insights and alignment. Bringing stakeholders along for the research journey was one of the best ways to gather support for the process. Whether is was asking them to take notes for me while I moderated interviews or asked them to join a store trip where we were testing design iterations for the store facing application. Having everyone informed and trusting the process was key to proxy's success.
Being open to suggestions from different perspectives is significant; I learned to make informative decisions and advocate for them with supportive data — whether qualitative or quantitative during the design process and presentation to the orgnization.
Since MVP launch in August 2021, this feature has allowed over 40,000 more orders to get picked up by a designated proxy person. The level of usage of this feature speaks volumes to the value of user needs and asks.This feature stemmed from requests by customers after all! This feature is actually projected to impact well over 10 million dollars of orders in the next year.
Please reach out to me directly to learn more about my process that helped make proxy pickup at DSG a reality.