Chico's + UserTesting

Chico’s, renowned for its high level of customer service in the retail fashion world, needed fast and reliable insights from customers about their online experiences. The company was implementing a major technology upgrade to their back-end infrastructure.

Making such a large technology investment meant that their online experience had to be as perfect as possible in order to drive enough online sales to deliver a strong payout.

To do that, however, the company needed a tool that would enable their design team to collect reliable customer insights that would empower them to implement changes and improvements on the fly.

Chico’s design team saw firsthand the problems they needed to fix by putting UserTesting to work. They conducted a series of unmoderated tests that allowed them to quickly gather qualitative customer perspective to inform key decisions about how best to design the online user experience. Chico's not only tested all aspects of usability on their site; they also researched customer perceptions that revealed valuable insights into Chico’s “Buy online, pick up in-store” implementation.

When questioned about the small sample size used to arrive at some of these fast qualitative insights, Kane Ford, Chico's Senior UX Designer, explained it this way: "Qualitative and quantitative data each have different purposes. Imagine that at the entrance to one of our stores, there's a welcome mat with one corner that had accidentally been folded over and caused a customer to trip and fall. You don't need to wait until 400 customers trip and fall and sue you before you fix the problem. Qualitative data often points obvious things we can't see because we're 'too close' to our business."

"Instead of engaging in time-consuming debates over which team has the best data, UserTesting keeps our conversations focused on our customers," Kane said. "Often times, just watching a real human being thinking out-loud while they experience our site is all people need to be convinced. That's why UserTesting insights are so actionable. Seeing what our customers see and hearing their voices is just invaluable."

Additionally, Chico’s team members have been able to expand their knowledge of research methods and stay ahead of best practices by connecting with other research professionals through UserTesting’s online community.

“By creating the CommUnity, UserTesting has become far more than a research and testing tool — they have become a place where professionals can come together to share ideas and techniques and learn from one another,” Ford said.

Chico's virtually eliminated unnecessary development hours allowing its software engineers to focus on things they knew would work the first time. Additionally, Chico's improved the digital customer journey by having a clear understanding of the 'why behind the what' in each decision taken to optimize the online customer experience.

Ultimately, the company was able to increase customer satisfaction and repeat purchases which had a positive impact on sales revenue.