Thomson – Creating an innovation roadmap

Overview

Innovation in product design begins with understanding customers’ needs. Thomson asked cxpartners to help it understand where and how it could add value to its customers.

cxpartners shadowed a group of Thomson’s customers over a two month period to understand how they chose and booked holidays.

TIP: Ethnography Find out about how cxpartners conduct
ethnographic
research

What we found was remarkable. For large portions of the user journey, neither Thomson nor its competitors had met customers’ needs. Elsewhere, small changes would make a huge difference to users’ experience.

The result was a roadmap of ideas that Thomson could use to transform its user experience.

What we did

cxpartners began by capturing the knowledge within Thompson about its customers. We interviewed stakeholders to capture their insights and used this to derive a task model of customers.

TIP: Task modelling Find out about how cxpartners conduct
task modelling

The first surprise was that this identified an entirely new type of customer. We then listened to call centre staff at work and held a workshop with them to validate the customer types. Sure enough, we found the ‘new’ customer segment existed.

We then recruited customers who were at the start of their holiday buying process. We conducted interviews in their homes, asking them to share the books, brochures, newsletters and websites that they used to find and book holidays.

We gave them diaries and interviewed them throughout their deliberations to build up a picture of what was going on.

The results

Because we watched a group of users who gradually became more and more familiar with the sites they were using and the products they were choosing, we saw a far wider variety of problems than would normally be seen in a user test.

And we were able to understand that the same user journey (from home page to a specific product) presented different problems to users depending on whether they were starting the process or were several weeks in to the task of choosing a holiday.

We also uncovered why many users drop out of the online buying process and opt for other (more expensive) channels or competitors’ products with equivalent features and prices.

This armed Thomson with a roadmap of projects, big and small, that would deliver innovative changes to the site that would have an impact on loyalty, conversion and revenue per customer.