Learning how bicycle buyers experience the buying process

Alpha version

Organization

B2C retail, brick-and-mortar store selling custom-made, high-end bicycles, 4 FTE (± 12 employees)

The challenge

What are the hurdles in the buying process that could discourage customers from buying a bicycle at our store?

Roles

  • Me: UX researcher
  • Research project collaborators: store owner, web content editor

Constraints

  • Budget: There was only budget for (existing) survey research, not for other research methods.
  • Resources: No ability to involve other personnel other than the web content editor. The store owner had limited time for the project.
  • Participants: The questionnaire could only be sent to customers that had bought a bicycle at the store.

My approach

Phase 1: Exploratory research – Initial interview

I interviewed the store owner and a customer to get their perspective on the current bicycle buyers’ customer journey and the hurdles they could identify. Their perspectives would give me a general idea of that process.

Phase 2: Selecting research methods

The store focused on a very specific niche: Cyclists with a hobby to spend their holidays travelling countries and continents by bike, using a very reliable, high-end customized bicycle. I already knew that the buyers’ journey of this audience often spans months, and that customers had multiple interactions with the retailer during their buyer’s journey.

A fitting research method would be a diary study, or a contextual inquiry. However, the store owner did not support compensating participants for their time or extensive involvement of his customers.

Therefore, I decided to use unobtrusive methods: observing, surveying (as they were already doing a yearly survey), and some additional interviewing of the store owner.

Phase 3: More exploratory research – Observations and interviews

Next, I visited the store several times and attended a fair for cyclists, to observe visitors and listen to the questions they ask. I also attended in-store activities about going on bicycle holidays, to find out what questions people ask. During the breaks of these events, I did ultra-short, unstructured interviews with random visitors, to learn about their backgrounds.

From this research, I learned that the actual buyers’ journey was more complex than what the store owner was aware of. My hypothesis was that the buyers’ journey had several additional phases that were very important to be acknowledged for improving the service design: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase decision, Waiting for bike, Receiving new bike, Tweaking new bike, Service, Retention. Next, I decided to research the difficulties consumers faced during each of the journey phases.

Phase 4: Survey

The store owner already had a yearly questionnaire for bicycle buyers. And every year, almost all bicycle buyers from that year participated in it, likely because they could win back the cost of their very expensive high-end bicycle.

As I wanted to learn from existing customer feedback, I asked for the latest questionnaire and its results. However, after reviewing the questionnaire and the feedback the store received it was clear that it made no sense to review feedback from older surveys, as the questions and answers were focused on things that were well under control.

Since the store owner was open to improving the questionnaire, I made an entirely new and more elaborate questionnaire, that combined multiple choice questions with follow-up open questions. The new questionnaire asked about different objectives to understand customer segments, the various steps in their buyers’ journey, and the decisions the bicycle buyers made. The store owner kept the generous incentive: people that participated in the survey, were able to win back the cost of their high-end bicycle.

After collecting a year of responses, I analyzed the answers. I used descriptive statistics, and did a thematic analysis of the open-ended questions.

Phase 5: Recommendations

Based on the survey findings, I made a list of recommendations to improve the customer journey. I gave the recommendations more context by doing desk research on market developments in the retail industry. I also did a competitor analysis to show what our competitors were doing to help bicycle shoppers. I presented this at the yearly all employee meeting.

Result

  • Created a new questionnaire that covered more phases of the buyers’ journey, more touchpoints, and was better at asking feedback.
  • Added a couple of standardized questions (SEQ and NPS) to the questionnaire, to be used for benchmarking performance with a future survey.
  • Found that the most or biggest hurdles customers were facing, were:
    • Selecting a suitable bicycle and biking gear (People spend many months on product research, the website of the bicycle store was only of moderate help in making decisions)
    • Being able to talk to employee on the phone
    • The store was not eager in offering their bicycles for test drives
    • Booking an appointment
    • The store’s limited communications after ordering a bicycle

Impact

  • Made 36 concrete and actionable proposals for improvement.
  • The store has implemented or experimented with 20 of the 36 proposals.

Reflection

The survey had important limitations:

  • The store only asked customers that bought something to fill in the questionnaire. This limits the ability to understand the issues of people that never bought something.
    • Possible solution: Use website intercepts, to get the perspective of prospecting customers.
  • The store only asked customers buying a bicycle to fill in the questionnaire. This limits the ability to understand the issues of the many customers that look for travel accessories, that want to repair their bike, or that attended an in-store activity.
    • Possible solution: Also ask people to participate when they are visiting the store for other things than buying a bike.
  • The survey covered a customer journey with a timespan of many weeks or months. People might remember things differently from what they actually experienced.
    • Possible solution: Perform many short interviews during touchpoints in earlier phases of the customer journey, such as before, during, and after in-store activities. Another opportunity would be when customers visit the store to get the customized bike that they ordered. Especially this latter touchpoint is a great opportunity for engaging with customers, since they spent considerable time in the store and are happy to share.

When performed with a lot of consideration, these might all be possible solutions that would be acceptable to the store owner. However, a diary study would probably be more efficient.