Designing an Unmatched Online Trading Experience

To deliver on Gumtree's aspirations, we knew that we would need to fully understand their customer's journey, from the first inquiry to final transaction. To build a complete and detailed understanding of their end-to-end user experience, we combined customer interviews and home observation with internal stakeholder holder meetings and the incorporation of existing research.

To drill down on the customer experience, we also facilitate two "jobs to be done" workshops. These workshops allowed us to gather live data on how customers reacted to Gumtree's services and highlighted crucial areas for improvement.

Drawing on the insights generated by our research, Proto was able to provide Gumtree with a deeper understanding of the six phases of customer interaction, awareness and research, orientation, listing and searching, contact with buyers or sellers, closing the deal and issues and troubleshooting.

By detailing the phases we were able to draw up the typical end to end journey of Gumtree users. We gained a rich understanding of what buyers and sellers valued, highlighting pain points and opportunity statements to aid in wowing Gumtree users at every touch point.

By mapping the phases of user experience in detail, we were able to understand the customer's primary needs and motivations. This fundamental information could then be distilled into actionable insights and opportunities. In total, 55 customer touch-points were mapped and analysed, with each touch-point generating customer insights, service themes, levels of friction and avenues of potential improvement.

To ensure that stakeholder and staff at Gumtree understood how they could contribute to the creation of the ideal customer journey, we created a number of guiding themes for improving and developing the user experience.

We aligned Gumtree staff using these themes, based on identified pain points and critical opportunities within the current buyer and seller journey. We also gave them the framework to build a customer-centric culture into the heart of their business. This framework enabled them to use the customer's needs as the driving force behind future service improvements.

To provide the tools required to make Gumtree's customer experience aspiration a reality, we created an extensive package of customer-centric tools and reference materials designed to inspire and guide Gumtree in delivering the ideal customer journey. The initiatives produced were grounded in customer feedback and created a customer strategy that responded to their revealed needs.

Out of our 45 service recommendations, Gumtree implemented 50% within nine months, with the rest made part of an 18-month rollout of co-designed services and features.