Crown Decorating Centres (CDCs) is a sub-brand of Crown Paints primarily aimed at trade. They have ‘centres’ across the country, and a website where customers can purchase paint and decorating products and have them delivered to their preferred store. It’s a very smooth operation when you’re a registered customer.
Not a registered customer? Well, that was a different story; a 1-4 week approval process, including a notice period, an in-store paper application and then confirmation of approval and paper loyalty card by post. Crown’s renewed ambition was for the entire onboarding process to take a matter of hours, not weeks.
This work demanded more than a customer-facing digital application form. It required a complete remodelling of how applications are reviewed and approved, and how progress is communicated along the way.
To fully understand what’s delaying the application process, we sat down with the clients and mapped out the internal process.
Using Figma Jam, we focused less on the customer barriers and more about where the data goes, who signs it off. This would inform the brief into UX to create a smooth onboarding experience, ensuring we only ask for the information we really needed.
The client also wanted to automate the behind-the-scenes process and remove as many internal terms as possible.
A technical lead was drafted in to work with the client on streamlining the specifics and improving the behind-the-scenes technology.
Starting with mobile, I worked on the customer-facing digital experience. Taking the brief from the journeys we’d mapped out with the client, we identified three account types; trade cash, trade credit and retail cash.
By capturing and verifying a customer’s email address prior to the application being started, we achieved two things; firstly, we knew the address was legitimate and opted-in for operational emails. Secondly, if the user didn’t complete the form, we could reach out to them directly and offer assistance.
The form was specifically designed to pull in certain inputs dynamically depending on which data had been input previously.
We overlaid our UX prototype with the Crown Decorating Centres branding, and design system from the live site. Our work had to feel very much a part of this website so it felt familiar to the user.
CDC had also drafted in their legacy agency to create a campaign look and feel for this new digital account, creating two hero assets for each audience.
This digital transformation is a big step for Crown; migrating existing customers from a physical loyalty card to a digital one that’s accessible on iOS and Android, so they can each be served their own unique pricing scheme.
For new customers, once they’re application has been successful, they can now download and add their digital card via a trigger email.
Got any questions or a new project in mind? Drop me a line.
