Creating a Customer-Centric Retail Ecosystem
Defining a multi-year transformation strategy for a leading duty-free retailer.
PROJECT TYPE
Design discovery
ROLE
Service designer
TIMELINE
4 months
TEAM
5 designers
I was part of a service design team helping a leading duty-free retailer define the future of its customer experience. Through customer research, service design, and co-creation, we identified strategic opportunities and developed a roadmap that guided future digital initiatives across the organisation.
01 Challenge
Shopping should be fun and simple, even when the business behind it isn’t
As a duty-free retailer, the business operated across online, airport, and downtown channels while navigating complex fulfillment, tax, and regulatory requirements. The challenge was to create experiences that felt seamless to customers without disrupting the operational processes required to support them.
02 research
Customers with different motivations were navigating the same fragmented experience.
We immersed ourselves in the business through competitive analysis, site visits across key locations, in-depth interviews with customers and stakeholders, and a thorough mapping of the current customer journeys. This gave us an honest picture of the experience as it actually existed, not as the business assumed it to be, and a clear sense of where competitors were outperforming.
on-ground research activities
Customer Mindsets: Different motivations shaped different journeys.
Our research revealed four recurring customer mindsets that shaped how people discovered, purchased, and engaged across channels.
Wang Li
Overseas Tourist - Tour Group
Family traveller who values convenience and curated experiences
Enjoys food, shopping, and discovering new experiences
Willing to spend, but always seeks the best deal
Wenjie
Overseas Tourist - Independent Traveller
Independent traveller who carefully plans her trips
Deal-conscious and digitally savvy
Enjoys exploring while staying in control of her decisions
Aimee
Local Traveler - Member
Long-standing loyalty member familiar with services and benefits
Shops across multiple channels and actively tracks rewards
Values convenience, familiarity, and membership privileges
Jeannie
Local Traveler - Non-member
New to the brand and motivated by promotions
Open to exploring new channels and experiences
Often influenced by recommendations from friends and family
We translated these mindsets into four future-state customer journeys, using our research to map how each traveller would discover, purchase, collect, and engage across channels.
03 Experience strategy
Shared pain points became strategic opportunities.
Despite their different motivations, common pain points emerged across the journeys. These recurring patterns became the strategic opportunities that guided the rest of the project.
Omnichannel
Create one connected experience
Seamless online-to-offline journeys
Consistent interactions across channels
Continue tasks wherever customers are at
Simplification
Make the journey easy
Streamline key processes
Remove unnecessary steps
Make shopping easier
Awareness
Help customers discover what's available
Personalization
Make the experience feel relevant
Understand individual needs
Tailor information and offers
Deliver more relevant experiences
04 ideation & co-creation
The best solutions required more than the design team.
We summarized our research and internally brainstormed ideas before bringing them into collaborative workshops with client stakeholders. Bringing stakeholders into the ideation process was deliberate. It brought in another important point of view that mattered to the business and surfaced operational constraints that would have otherwise emerged too late.
One of the most important discoveries was that many customer experiences relied heavily on manual effort behind the scenes. This shifted our thinking beyond customer-facing touch points. Rather than designing only for customers, we began looking for opportunities that also simplified operations and made services more sustainable to deliver.
validation & co-creation
Each opportunity theme informed a set of service concepts that addressed one or more customer needs.
examples of concept posters
05 prioritization
Turning vision into an actionable roadmap
The future-state journeys contained 32 service concepts spanning the four opportunity themes. We worked with stakeholders to evaluate and prioritize concepts based on customer value, business impact, feasibility, and organizational readiness.
prioritization workshop
07 Outcome
What we delivered...
A shared vision for the future of travel retail
Current-state journeys
Captured existing customer journeys, pain points, and friction across channels.
32 service concepts
Explored opportunities across omnichannel experience, customer awareness, simplification, and personalization.
2 Future-state journeys
Defined a shared vision for how customers could discover, purchase, collect, and engage in the future.
Prioritized feature & concept list
Aligned stakeholders around the initiatives that would deliver the greatest value and impact.
08 reflection
What stayed with me...
Discovering what design could be
This project came early in my career and shaped how I think about design's role within a broader organization. It showed me that the work goes far beyond screens and interfaces. It showed me how design can bring together people, perspectives, and decisions to create meaningful change across an organization.
Returning to fundamentals
I often look back on this project when I find myself too deep in a particular problem, process, or framework. It reminds me to focus on what really matters: understanding people and identifying meaningful opportunities. More importantly, it gave me a foundation toolkit of methods and ways of thinking that I still return to today.
Insights create value only when they travel
Looking back, the thing I'd do differently is push harder for the customer insights we developed to travel further. We built a deep understanding of customers that largely stayed within the design team and was translated only into what fell within our scope. In reality, those insights were relevant to many other workstreams. I've since come to see cross-functional knowledge sharing not as a nice-to-have, but as part of the design team's responsibility.