Selfridges Unlocked
Selfridges' customer membership programme, where I owned the experience strategy and made sure it worked the same way online, in email and in the building.
- Year
- 2024
- Focus
- Customer experience, Membership, Luxury retail
The challenge
Selfridges wanted a membership programme that gave its most engaged customers access, events and a more personal level of service. The idea was clear enough. The difficulty was that membership doesn't sit in one place. It shows up on the website, in an email, at a till and on the shop floor, and each of those is owned by a different team with its own plans and its own deadlines. Left to run separately it would have launched as four or five versions of the same thing, and customers would have felt every seam.
My role
Head of UX, Digital Design & Content Management. Accountable for the experience strategy behind Unlocked, the sign-up and onboarding design, and the consistency of the experience across digital and physical touch points, working with CRM, Product, Marketing and Retail.
The approach
- Set the experience strategy for the programme and tied it to what the business actually wanted membership to do.
- Designed the sign-up and onboarding flow so joining was quick, and so the value of joining was obvious at the moment we asked.
- Worked with CRM, Product and Marketing to shape the benefits around customer insight, rather than designing around a list handed over late.
- Held the experience consistent across web, email and store, so membership behaved the same way wherever a customer met it.
- Ran cross-functional workshops and experience mapping sessions to get Product, Marketing and Retail looking at the same picture.
- Made sure the in-store presence felt like part of the programme and part of the brand, not a poster about a website.
- Kept going after launch, watching behaviour and feedback and refining onboarding, engagement and personalisation.
What I learned
I spent too long treating this as a digital programme with some store considerations bolted onto the end. The people on the shop floor were the ones who'd have to explain it to a customer face to face, and they had questions I hadn't thought to answer. Once they were properly in the room the design got simpler, which is usually a sign you've been solving the wrong version of the problem.