Apparicio

Head of product design

Apparicio

Apparicio

2019

7 months

Senior Product Designer @ Hero (later acquired by Klarna)

Increasing sales by turning browsers into conversations.

Designing the WhatsApp customer experience and the reserve journey that turned online conversations into in-store visits.

My role

Senior UX designer

Timeline

2019 → 7 months

Team Composition

Product design, with content design, engineering and the retail partnerships team.

LINK

klarna.com

Hero connects online shoppers with real store associates, by text or by video, so someone browsing a website can talk to an expert standing on the shop floor. It was used across fashion, footwear and homeware, by luxury names and mass retailers at the same time, and was later acquired by Klarna.

If you only read one part

Close the tab and the conversation was gone. In seven months I designed the WhatsApp channel and Reserve, which let a shopper put an item aside in-store without leaving the chat. One in three who talked online then walked in.

WhatsApp gives a business 24 hours to reply, so every message had to earn its interruption. Designing to that rule is why spend per purchase rose 70%.

The problem

Customers could chat and video call while they were on the site. The problem was everything that happened after they left it.

Conversations died the moment the browser tab closed.

Chatbots were already failing to hold anyone's attention.

Compliance and GDPR governed every message that could be sent.

People do not expect to buy through a messaging app, so the habit itself had to change.

No way for an associate to follow up, and no route to an upsell.

WhatsApp Business limits businesses to a 24-hour reply window.

Messages had to reach the right associate, not a queue.

Returning customers needed a reason to come back at all.

The interesting part was never building a chat. It was working out which messages deserved to interrupt someone, and designing a channel that stayed useful to the business without ever feeling like spam to the customer.

The goal

Three things, agreed before anything was designed.

01.

Give associates a channel they own

Let teams text and email their own customers, so the relationship outlasts a single session.

02.

Recover the sales being lost

Tell customers when something is back in stock, so a no becomes a later yes.

03.

Make it feel like a shop floor

Connect shoppers with named experts in named stores, socially rather than transactionally.

What I did

Ran the research with both sides of the conversation.

Surveys and interviews with shoppers, then store visits to sit with associates. The associate interviews were the ones that changed the design. They knew exactly which conversations converted and which wasted a day, and none of that was in the brief. Alongside it, a UX audit of the existing mobile and web experience and a competitor analysis to see what the category had already tried and failed at.

Designed the WhatsApp customer chat.

The entry point on the retailer's site, the department routing, and the handover to a named associate in a named store. The hard part was continuity: a customer starts on a website and finishes in a third-party app, and the design had to make that feel like one conversation rather than two. That included what the business profile shows, how the first message sets expectations, and what happens when the associate is not available.

Designed Reserve, from availability check to pickup.

A customer could check whether an item was in stock in a nearby store, reserve it inside the conversation, and receive a card confirming it was waiting for them. Behind that sat the product picker, variations for colour and size, store location by geolocation or postcode, a limit on how many items could be held, and a reserved-items list so associates could track, cancel and follow up.

Wrote the one-time notification templates with content design.

Anything sent outside the 24-hour window had to be a pre-approved template. Working with the content design team, we built them around the three things people actually messaged about: checking stock on something out of stock, following up on a purchase, and collecting an item in store. Compliance stopped being a blocker and became the thing that kept the channel worth opening.

Mapped the associate experience alongside the customer one.

Contacts split by whether a customer was added in store or online, chat claiming so a single associate owned a thread, and a CRM sync so profiles carried spend history, order history and preferences. Designing both sides at once was the only way the routing rule could actually hold.

A timeline view, 7 months of work

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Research and audit

WhatsApp customer chat

Notification templates

Reserve

MVP rollout

Two features designed and shipped, one platform mapped, in seven months. Sequencing shown here is a placeholder.

The outcome

1 in 3

1 in 3

1 in 3

1 in 3

customers went into a store after interacting with the clienteling experience.

+70%

+70%

+70%

+70%

spend per purchase

One in three is the hardest handover in retail, an online conversation turning into a physical visit, and it is the thing every clienteling product promises. It was the number that made the case internally.

Behaviour changed too. More customers used WhatsApp to chat and shop, in a market where buying through a messaging app was not yet a habit for most people.

And the conversations were worth more. Average order value rose when people could get help on demand, which is what made this a commercial result rather than a nicer experience.

In retrospect

Projects are often bigger than their brief. As soon as the research started the need space widened, and what began as "add WhatsApp" became a question about which messages deserve to reach someone at all.

Third-party integrations move underneath you. WhatsApp's rules were not ours to negotiate and any of them could change without notice. Designing inside somebody else's constraints taught me to treat the limitation as the brief rather than the obstacle, and the work was more creative for it.

NEXT CASE

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