In order to better outline the future vision of digital commerce for our direct cremation partner, SCI Direct, the SCI Digital Marketing Team held a 3-day design workshop where the first two days would focus on design materials, the last half-day delving more into a MVP feature exercise facilitated by the Product Management Team with an IT presence.

I was responsible for planning and facilitating a number of interactive exercises with my team, presenting a lunchtime Competitor's Landscape segment, and most importantly picking out a place for all eleven attendees (four from out of town) to eat out at on the second day!

Workshop Goal

Through collaboration with our SCI Direct stakeholders, validate our existing knowledge and gather the new information produced here to best understand SCI Direct users.

GROUP ACTIVITIES
• Review existing personas
• Define scenarios and user flows
• Conduct empathy mapping for personas
• Map omni-channel user journey

MAIN OUTPUTS
• Validated personas
• Key user flow diagrams and scenarios
• Customer journeys

Guiding Principles

In order to keep the end user and their digital commerce experience at the forefront, we collectively used these overarching guidelines to ensure our design thinking remained genuine and with intent.

Competitive Analysis

We went through different online sites and discussed how certain features of each one contribute to the online appeal of a consumer in both at-need and pre-need scenarios.

EXAMPLES
• Parting Pro Online Arrangement Process
• Tulip Cremation
• Solace Cremation
• Everdays

Takeaways

• Self-service options are extremely desirable where customers are able to drive the experience with a limited set of choices within a seamless flow of steps.

• Having a chat option available is valuable to bridge the communication gap between missing information and having assistance during the process online.

• Certain vendors who outsource resources can’t reliably maintain a fully reliable system of quality, which results in negative online reviews in those outsourced stages.

• Most vendors looked at relied on a progressive form workflow in some part of the process (gathering information for a quote, collecting basic personal information, etc.) in order to break up big chunks of fields and inputs and reduce cognitive load for users.

• Everdays’ presentation of simple packages, warm messaging, and handheld process with implied human assistant throughout was considered to be an all-around effective way of assuming a supportive role in users navigating the online process.

Personas

Before the workshop, there were prior meetings with members of the SCI Direct team to run through the preliminary external (2 consumers) and internal (2 field personnel) personas developed, and they gave feedback to develop them further. Below are the personas that were used for the workshop, primarily for empathy mapping and for creating and validating the different customer journeys.

Empathy Mapping Exercise

After going through the personas and their scenarios, the design team then led the workshop attendees through an empathy mapping exercise to better understand our SCI Direct users, and to see what they were feeling and experiencing through a separate lens. After a round of voting on what would be the three most important items for each persona, every group had a brief recap to everyone on what they learned.

Customer Journey Exercise

With our two consumer personas Dan and Susan, we split into new groups and facilitated the next exercise that dealt with building out a more nuanced journey on what happens when our users experience different milestones or life events, and how does SCI Direct intervene at those meaningful touch points. It was important to observe and outline where our two other [internal] personas come into play and what roles they serve in the overall customer experience.

Distilling all the bits and pieces (Post-its)

Following the workshop, we took time on our side to run through all the pictures of the recorded customer journeys and figure out the best way to approach illustrating all of it not only for our benefit, but for our partners at SCI Direct as well so they could identify glaring pain points in the existing process, or building on where they are getting things right in the consumers' eyes. Below is one of many customer journey outputs and one of the ways we distributed the workshop deliverables after (more complete versions of all the exercises were digitally recreated within Miro), highlighting the main phases of each journey and recording how each step of the process will influence steps after.

Wrap up

This workshop was a beneficial event to not only break bread with our distant team members and delve deeper into the minds of our users, but to have a fresh take on the customer journey for SCI Direct, and look at new brand opportunities for upcoming commerce features.