Transforming Personalized Retail

PIRCH is an award-winning kitchen and bath retailer, whose mission is to reinvent the shopping experience for those who are building or remodeling their homes.

Unlike a typical appliance retail experience where customers navigate large sterile warehouses and stacks of product binder catalogs, PIRCH focuses on the human experience by building meaningful relationships with their customers. I helped design the PIRCH Advisor to be the ultimate companion tool to help sales consultants collaborate with customers as they build their dream home.

As a user experience designer on the product, I was involved in defining the overall architecture and designing key user workflows such as saving products to customer's mood boards. 

Role
Junior UX Designer

Context
Client: Pirch
2013

Team
Sabrina Boler (UX Lead)

“Our showrooms allow you to fully experience a vast array of products, so you can be sure you make the right choices. With the guidance of our expert sales consultants, you can discover kitchen appliances, plumbing, hardware, and outdoor appliances that stretch your imagination.”

PIRCH

A companion ready for the showroom

Unlike a traditional, technical Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools used behind the scenes, we designed the PIRCH Advisor to be a companion ready to be used throughout every step of the way of the customer journey. Sales consultants can input customer information, create and track project plans and goals, browse products, find product information, save products for a project and create beautiful visual proposals for customers, in an easy-to-carry tablet while on the floors of the showroom.

Supporting the
Customer Journey

The final solution empowers sales consultants to collaborate with their customers throughout each stage of their journey. Between encouraging limitless collection during the early ‘dream’ phases of a project, and delivering trusted presentations and print-outs during the final delivery phases of a project, we designed all key unique features to support these personal moments of trusted collaboration with the customer.

A Responsive Tool that Adapts to Different Needs

Throughout the day, Lifestyle Experience advisors transition through many modes and engage in several different interactions with the customer and their team. In the morning they may be walking throughout the store vignettes pointing out product functionality to the customer, or they may even need a meeting room to discuss and present the latest proposal with a customer, while other parts of the day may require them to work on the computer.   These various needs required us to implement a web tool that was responsive to any device and presentation-ready for any screen. 

Seamless Hand-off & Delivery

Engineering Partnership

Constant collaboration with the Engineering team was required to deliver this product using an Agile methodology. Because this product had to integrate with the PIRCH database of existing customers and prior projects, I developed a deeper understanding of how back-end data should work cohesively with the product. Over the course of this project, I helped shape sprint planning and product prioritization.

Launch Materials

Preparing this product for release also meant delivering training materials to allow a user to quickly onboard and switch into a new system.

Impact

Better insights
This new system unlocked a new opportunity to track customer interests throughout the design process. suppliers can get a level of understanding about what people looked at, put on wish lists, and bought. Store layout data, together with data from the application, gives them unique inventory insights as well as helps them identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. The PIRCH stores and PIRCH Advisor are changing the industry standard for how to showcase brands and products in a way that enriches the customer experience and strengthens brand loyalty.