YPO - Improve the customer journeys

A deep dive into the customer mind to understand what really drives buying behaviour.

The brief

YPO appointed us as their Digital Agency to help drive their business forward through delivering incremental web development changes to their Sitecore platform. After years of working alongside YPO to become their trusted partner, YPO revealed that 2020 would be the year that they invested in the customer and the user experience across their digital real estate.

The issue with the YPO website was that the look and feel had always been a one size fits all approach and little had been done to improve the customer journeys throughout the site’s development. Through a better understanding of the customer, their needs, their challenges and their values, YPO knew they would be able to better serve the customer, deliver a relevant, personalised user experience and gain more market share with improved customer experience.

Our solution

We performed a detailed discovery, combining expert research with conducting in-depth user interviews with people from the various sectors that made up YPO’s target audience:

  • Early Years
  • Primary Education
  • Secondary Education
  • Local Authority
  • Emergency Services

The user research and 1 to 1 interviews uncovered rich, valuable insights into the needs, personalities, attitudes and behaviours of the people that represent ideal customers for YPO.

Through these interviews, Sagittarius was able to map the user experience, uncovering the trends in pain points across the sectors, as well as the unique challenges that each sector and job role face when integrating the customer experience with YPO into their day-to-day working lives.

Our results

Using the findings from our discovery, we carefully distilled the insights down into a full usability report, detailing what we had learned about our audiences, including key findings and recommendations for next steps to improve the online experience.

We were able to create fictional representations of key customer types (personas). These personas portrayed clear and concise information about the customer, their job role, responsibilities, their goals and their frustrations in achieving these goals.

Alongside these snapshots of the different customers, we have created experience maps to outline their goals, and what they thought, felt and did at each stage of the customer journey, from initial awareness to purchase and product usage.

This has allowed us to deliver landing page concept designs that break the website out into its different sectors, allowing the user to move down the path that leads them to more relevant content tailored to their sector, and to the specific actions they need to take to get their jobs done.

The outputs of our research have also gone far beyond the website. YPO is now using the personas and experience maps to make meaningful decisions within the business that benefit from having an understanding of their customers.

Who are YPO?

YPO is one of the UK’s largest public-sector buying organisations, supplying products and services to a wide range of customers including schools, local authorities, charities, emergency services, nurseries and care homes.

Being 100% publicly owned by 13 local authorities, the profits that YPO make are returned back to their public sector customers – delivering better value for money.
Handling around 30,000 products and over 100 frameworks, YPO can provide the public sector with everything they could possibly need to run their organisation. Whether it’s stationery, computers, furniture, or even things like electricity, food and insurance, YPO can help save their customers money through better procurement.

What our client said...

Sagittarius has taken the time to fully understand us as a client and ensure they do work that impresses us and more importantly impresses our customers.

David O’Brien, Digital Solutions Manager

YPO

How can we help you?

Use digital to drive ecommerce revenues at scale

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