Reimagining Partner Services
OUR GOAL
To design a future state experience for our partners. By understanding their current experiences, goals, needs and pain points, we can offer tailored and market-leading services that meet those needs:
OBJECTIVES
Growth for Partners - Providing solutions to partners that meet their needs and strategic priorities will provide the means and mechanisms for their growth (GMV, Average Order Value)
Business Growth - Having premium solutions for partners that will help differentiate our platform of solutions. Having a structure proposition that creates mutual value. (Partner Volume,
Market leading technological products - Shaping the luxury industry using our expertise, technology and unique position on the market, to not only lead the market, but shape the market for the future.
CONTEXT
Farfetch partners with hundreds of luxury boutiques and designer brands worldwide, currently listing items from over 1,300 partners including high-end labels like Chanel, Burberry, and smaller independent boutiques, allowing customers to access a vast selection of luxury fashion on a single platform; this number can fluctuate depending on the current partnerships and collaborations.
THE PROBLEM WERE TRYING TO SOLVE
The exponential and expedited growth of FARFETCH as a Platform meant the systems, technologies (For e.g. Integrations) process and experiences were very similar irrespective of size. This meant the effort, cost and resources weren’t allocated to the most valuable partners proportionately. The needs of Brands with warehouses and distrubution networks (Chanel, Harrods, Burberry) are very different from sole trader boutiques with curated specialists ranges .
APPROACH AND ROLE
My team acted as in house Business, Service and Product design team partnering with key stakeholders like Partner Product, Partner Operations and Business Performance analytics to form a virtual team that followed a human centred design process combined with Agile development programme.
DISCOVERY
We used a combination of:
Performance Analytics
AS IS Service Blueprint Combined with core end to end process mapping
Etthnographic research with partners (Key points of contact)
This was combined into one discovery report of needs and a deep sense check on our partners needs, so we had a deep understanding of whats important to partners, what characteristics drive different needs and what are the key pain points within the the core journey’s
PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
Based on the research Personas were developed to give us an asset that helps us represent and communicate partners:
GOALS
NEEDS
ATTITUDES
PAIN POINTS
KEY CHARACTERISTICS
Key take out:
We learned our current segmentation (GMV based) and assumed needs were not refllect of reality
Larger partners often had better market intelligence capabilities and therefore, valued these services less than growth-seeking smaller partners
All partners valued effective self-service agnostic tools, and it wasn’t a safe assumption that client managers are the ‘Gold’ standard
SOLUTION
Tiered Service Catalogue
Through co-creation in response to the insight we developed a Tiered Service Catalogue. This Service Catalogue served as a basis for a clear proposition that was tailored to partners needs.
Giving value in ways based on needs for their circumstances vs assumptions. For e.g a larger partner with greater volume would benefit from more advanced integrations to cope with volumes but would likely have larger team tracking their brand performance. This is in contrast to smaller partners who don’t have large insights teams so value trend & performance analysis tools, but who are less concerned with high volume integration capabilities.
Based on needs, how businesses like to buy and where they most value support from FARFETCH. True partnership to help them succeed in their venture in line with their strategy and what is a priority for them.
PROPOSITION TAILORED TO BUSINESS NEED
CORE JOURNEYS BY PARTNER SEGMENT
Beyond the propostion we thought through how all services in the way how user will interface and interact with them. So touch-points are seamless, intuitive and thoughtful right from onboarding, in-life through to scaling and progression
CORE JOURNEY ATLAS
We articulated how the tiered service catalogueare most effectively integrated into end to end experiences so it becomes a valuable service that meets partners needs, not a ‘Bolt on’ sales pitch. By offering expert consultation, guided selection with supported implementation. This was depicted in a Journey Framework we called our Journey Atlas which was a helpful structured to all core customer journeys
Agile Implementaion
It takes time to transform. We started small. Through robust prioritisation we are able to see which concepts met the goals of the projects, met strategic goals, partner desirability and commercial benefits.
To be delivered by mechanisms within the current change landscape
To prototype and trial concepts for iteration and early value
Business case and backlog prioritisation
RESULTS & IMPACT (£)
Increase conversion from prospect to client by 10% to 23%
Partners NPS increased overall by 8% YoY which was primarily driven by Onboarding NPS touchpoint which increase by an average 22ppt across all partner tiers
OPEX Reduction through reduced Contacts Per Partner (CPP) and Average Handling Time (AHT) with an annualised benefit over 230
Partner Satisfaction Survey increase with Partners scoring likely to stay with FARFETCH increase from 3.2 to 4.3
Reduced technology administration and development time with annualised benefit of ~560
Increased Employee Satisfaction with an increase of 12% YoY for Partner Service with key drivers being ‘I have the tools i need for my Job’