Stockmann elevates customer experience with Leanlab

A shift towards customer-centricity

At the turn of the 2020s, Stockmann made a strategic decision to focus more intensively on customer experience development. To execute this new CX strategy Stockmann built its customer experience team from the ground up and adopted new digital tools for the Voice of the Customer programme. Leanlab was chosen as a customer community platform to facilitate faster customer collaboration in developing and improving customer journeys. 

Building an engaged customer community

Stockmann has successfully built a vibrant customer lab on the Leanlab platform, with 1200 active members. The engagement levels have surpassed expectations, with members showing enthusiasm for participating in various development activities. How did they achieve it?

Here are some tricks how they have done it:

• Participants: Open to all, but particularly appealing to loyalty program members who have a regular connection with the brand.
• Recruitment: Appeals to people's desire to help rather than relying on heavy prize incentives. Promotion occurs through email, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to attract a diverse group of participants.
• Active engagement: The team averages about two new customer research tasks per month.
• Open ideation: Alongside focused tasks, there's a section for open ideas and feedback. This has contributed to several new ideas that have been implemented.
• Open communication: Stockmann's team regularly shares how customer feedback is applied in their development process.
• True two-way dialogue: Stockmann team members actively engage in discussions with participants, fostering direct communication.

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Stockmann has a vibrant community with 1200 active members (image: illustration)

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Stockmann engages its customer lab for both in-store as well as digital services development

Stockmann utilises Leanlab for big and small customer journey development needs -  all the way from strategic visioning down to tactical improvements in the omnichannel context. Here are some example projects that Stockmann has used their own private customer lab for:

1. Multi-stage development projects: A prime example is the potential renovation of the 8th floor restaurant world in Helsinki's flagship store. To plan a possible renewal of the restaurant experience Stockmann engaged its Customer lab participants across several stages of the development process:
   • Initial visioning: Customer lab participants were presented with more visionary large-scale themes and concepts and asked about their preferences and thoughts regarding them.
   • Current state analysis: To better understand how the existing restaurant world is perceived the lab has been used to gather feedback on what works well right now and what needs improvement.
   • Concept testing: To understand how customers view different possible future designs, lab members have been presented with different design concepts created by external partners. These have then been evaluated and discussed in the lab.
   • Iterative feedback: Since the launch of the project the dialogue about the restaurant world has been going on in the lab allowing Stockmann to continuously refine ideas based on customer input.

1. Digital UX development: Leanlab enables really rapid 24-48hr user testing and iteration and this turned out to be a critical success factor for renewing the login process:
   • At the point where the CX team got involved in the project, the login development was already quite far gone. The obvious option at that point would have been to just accept the risk, finalise development, launch and then fix issues later.
   • With Leanlab Stockmann saw the possibility to take a quick break in the development and split up the testing into three smaller entities. These were then step-by-step tested in Leanlab during a period of just two weeks. 
   • The testing proved it’s worth, since there were several aha-moments where the customer feedback showed that what the project team had anticipated didn’t align with the customer view.

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Stockmann use a variety of methods on Leanlab to develop their digital UX (image: illustration)

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1. Continuous brand and product feedback: Beyond specific development projects, Stockmann uses Leanlab to maintain ongoing customer dialogue on ideas, trends and new products:
   • An always-open discussion forum in their customer lab allows customers to share ideas and suggestions for Stockmann's development. Lab participants can comment and upvote on each other's ideas. 
   • This forum helps identify emerging trends and customer preferences.
   • Customers can suggest new brands they'd like to see at Stockmann.
   • Enabling customers to share ideas and engage in direct dialogue makes them feel valued and more connected to the Stockmann brand.

By utilising Leanlab across the entire CX development pipeline, Stockmann has been able to create a more holistic, customer-centric approach to their journey development. The platform's flexibility allows Stockmann as a business to rapidly gather insights for both strategic decisions and day-to-day improvements, fostering a culture of continuous customer-driven innovation and improving the quality of decision making.

Key benefits of using Leanlab

1. Speed and agility:
   "The best thing with Leanlab is the speed. If you want some customer perspective for an important meeting tomorrow, you will get it."
   
   
2. Versatility of research methods:
   "It enables both qualitative and quantitative research methods within one platform, which is a huge benefit"
   
   
3. Enhanced brand loyalty:
   "Having a certain group with whom you always discuss topics that we don't really discuss outwardly at all... I would say that brand loyalty is certainly also a big added value that you get from Leanlab."
   
   
4. Improved decision-making:
   "The ability to quickly gather customer insights has led to many "aha moments" for project teams, challenging assumptions and leading to better-informed decisions."

Key takeaways

• A customer lab can dramatically speed up the process of gathering customer insights.
• Customers are eager to participate in developing services and products they care about.
• Having all research tools on one platform simplifies the process and saves costs.
• Regular, transparent communication with community members is crucial for maintaining engagement.