Mobile Ethnography White Paper
Learn how Mobile Ethnography can supplement your research projects and generate richer contextual insights for your brands.
How online retailers can use our Digital Ethnography tool to research and map their Omni-channel Customer Journey
This goal of this project was to explore an online retailer’s E-commerce omni-channel customer journey all the way from the social media influence to the decision process of choosing an item to searching online to purchasing it and receiving the item.
The retail brand urgently needed to better understand the positive and negative moments for every touchpoint of their omni-channel purchase journey, namely:
The impact of social media influencers
How customers browsed their website?
How did they search for / choose products?
What was their user experience like?
What were their thoughts and feelings between the time they placed the order and the time they received it?
What was the out of the box experience like and how did they feel ‘unboxing’ it?
The research method: mapping omni-channel Customer Journeys
This brand set the respondents a variety of tasks and selected a mixture of photos, videos, notes and mobile screen recordings to capture the in-the-moment behaviours that they were seeking to understand.
Some tasks were exploratory in nature and were deliberately designed to be extremely open and flexible. This enabled the brand to capture the individual customer’s journey without dictating this journey to them.
Other tasks were much more user experience oriented in nature and were designed to be much more focused. The goal of these user experience research tasks was to capture contextual data and insights on specific touchpoints of the customer journey.
Some tasks, such as researching the customer experience between placing the order and receiving it, were set up so that they could be revisited by respondents multiple times as needed. This enabled them to submit their thoughts and feelings any time they wished in this period of time.
Tasks also varied in length. Some were short and snappy. Other tasks required more thought and reflection from the customers.
Tone and language were adjusted accordingly for each task to convey the request.
Finally, the key to the success of this project was very active and engaged moderation on behalf of the client.
20 Respondents
11 Tasks
2 Weeks
Tasking Strategy: Sequential
The results: an interactive retail customer journey map
The insights gathered were shared by the research consultancy with the client and their stakeholders across marketing, product and digital. The results were extremely well received across the clients business with various parts of the business being provided with context rich insights (and video proof) which then enabled them to act on the insights.
The context rich, in-the-moment highs and lows of the customer journey were accurately pinpointed allowing the marketing team to act decisively by tackling problem areas that had emerged during the research.
Indeemo’s customer journey mapping feature was enabled for this study, allowing the brand to visualise exactly how their customers rated every step of their omni-channel journey, on both an individual level and at a group level.
Get beyond NPS: capturing omni-channel customer experiences in context with video and screen recordings
Before using Digital Ethnography to map their customer journey, the brand relied on post rationalised surveys that gave them contextless net promoter scores. These net promoter scores told them what was wrong but it did not tell them why.
The ability for the brand to record their customer experience in the moment and automatically graph their customer journey coupled with the ability to get multimedia proof for each high and low enabled them to get way beyond traditional net promoter scores and surface what really mattered to their customers.
Why Digital Ethnography is so powerful for retail customer journey mapping
The variation of tasks and the use of sequential tasking, allowed respondents to pace themselves and follow their schedule, as well as that of the postal service relied on for receiving their products.
Active and engaged moderators on this project brought a welcome human touch to the study, ensuring respondents felt that their inputs and uploads were valued and appreciated. This was achieved by sending customised reminders as well as commenting under uploads, allowing respondents to reply and engage with the moderator in real-time.
Mobile screen recording allowed them to understand exactly how their customers used their website providing additional insights not previously understood.
Let us support your next Customer Journey mapping project
Digital Ethnography is a rich, agile way to get a deeper understanding of participants’ everyday lives and behaviors. When combined with out Journey Mapping capability, it enables brands and businesses to remotely research user experiences and customer experiences in the moment.
Projects can range from a few days to as long as a year but are typically 1 to 2 weeks in duration.
After analysing the engagement on hundreds of projects, we have learned a lot about how to optimize research for mobile and can activate your Digital Ethnography projects in as little as one working day.
