Describing shopping experience with customer journey maps for digital service design

Background: With increasing competition in retail environment, customer retailer loyalty becomes a critical objective for retailers. Results of former study show that a satisfactory shopping experience could enhance customers) cumulative or overall satisfaction and ultimately customer retailer loyalty. As more and more people use smartphone, shopping experience could possibly be improved with different forms of innovative retail mobility solutions that put a wealth of information at customers' fingertips. To support creating innovative mobility solutions for improving shopping experience, this thesis starts from studying customers' current shopping experience with retail services in Finland and China. Methods and Data: The empirical part of this thesis used design probe, mobile probe, semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation to collect data for answering research questions. 6 Finnish participants and 6 Chinese participants were studied in this research. In total, 12 filled probes were collected and 10 interviews were conducted. Results: As a result, four customer journey maps were created to visually illustrate shopping experience of two personas. There are three types of important shopping related touch-points: physical, digital & intangible, and people-based. Interactions around important touch-points should be well designed to fit customers' needs. Customers' emotional states are relatively active while searching for and comparing products. Currently, customers use mobile more often to assist shopping rather than purchasing directly through mobile. The most common shopping activities with mobile are to compare price and search for product information. Nevertheless, several opportunities to improve current shopping experience with creative mobility solutions were identified, such as mobile inspiration of shopping and decision-making assistant. In future, the work could be continued with the focus on studying more customer groups and, eventually, contributing to create innovative mobility solutions