CVC Corp · Omnichannel retail · Project lead · Awarded in 2013
The project dies at the counter
A network of more than a thousand stores, with the entire sale happening face to face, needing digital to turn into sales inside the shop. Designing the bridge from the website to the counter is the easy half of the problem.
The hard half is the person behind that counter. They did not ask for any of this, their day is already full, and they are paid for what they sell themselves. Until their own maths works out, the project does not exist, however good the screen is.
- Role
- Lead of the online to store project, from concept to rollout across a network of more than a thousand points of sale, within a thirteen year run at the company.
- Context
- Travel retail with sales concentrated in face to face service, a large store network, and a digital channel that brought interest without being able to prove it became revenue.
- Method honesty
- This is 2013 and I have no screens, prototypes or reports to publish. What this page holds is the award, the reference from someone who led the company alongside me, and the reasoning. If that is not enough for an evaluator, fair enough, and that is why it sits after the cases that carry artefacts.
From interest on the site to a sale at the counter
- 01
Context
A network of more than a thousand points of sale, with revenue concentrated in face to face service.
- 02
The problem
Digital generated interest and could not prove it turned into a sale inside the store.
- 03
The bridge
Connect what the person does on the site to what happens when they walk in, without making anyone start over.
- 04
Adoption
Work with the people at the counter, because omnichannel dies there when the salesperson sees no gain.
- 05
Outcome
The company's innovation case and the ABEMD Gold Award, in 2013.
Digital brought the people and lost the credit
In 2013 the omnichannel conversation in Brazilian retail was still almost entirely about the website. People researched destinations, built an itinerary, compared prices and then went to settle it in a store, with a human, because travel is an expensive purchase full of doubt. Digital did half the work and showed up nowhere when results were counted.
That produces two bad effects at once. Investment in digital becomes hard to defend internally, because the sale is booked as if it had been born at the counter. And the person who walks into the store starts from zero, repeating to the attendant everything they had already put together at home.
While a sale that starts in digital is credited entirely to the counter, digital is a cost. Once it is recognised in both places, the same project becomes an investment.
The most important user sits on the other side of the counter
What changed the project was to stop treating the traveller as the only user. There is a second user, who works in the system every day, for eight hours, and who decides alone whether any of it catches on: the salesperson in the store.
For them, an online to store initiative arrives as three unpleasant things at once. Another system to learn, another step in the service flow, and the suspicion that the company is building the channel that will replace their store. If the design does not answer that, the counter ignores the new flow and redoes everything by hand, and the numbers show a feature nobody ever used.
The design question stops being how to move the person from the site to the store and becomes what the salesperson gains when they arrive with the journey already started.
Here I stop, on purpose. The exact rule for how a sale coming from digital was recognised for the store and for the salesperson is the central piece of this project, and I will not rebuild from memory, thirteen years later, a detail that defines the whole story. What I do defend is the framing: adoption at the counter was treated as a design problem, carrying the same weight as the customer journey, and that is what made the project run across more than a thousand stores.
What the person at the table says
With no archive left from this project, the evidence that remains is the word of someone who built it alongside me. Marcio Borges Malta led the company at the time and names the project directly.
Reinner is excellent to work with. Curious and resilient, always focused on solutions that challenge the status quo. Together we created a very successful online to store case for a company that was 100% offline, with more than a thousand stores.
The crisis portal
The same run at the company produced a delivery of a very different nature, and I keep it here because it shows another kind of decision. During an operational crisis, with support drowning in repeated tickets, we launched a portal that concentrated the answers people were looking for. The company measured a ninety per cent drop in tickets within one week.
The reasoning is the same one behind the products I design today. Support volume is almost always a symptom of information that exists and is not where the person looks for it. Attacking the symptom means hiring people to answer faster. Attacking the cause means putting the answer in front of the question.
What stayed on record
The award is public and verifiable. The other two numbers belong to the company, measured inside it, and I hold the report for neither. In a case from thirteen years ago, that is the difference between telling what happened and proving what happened, and I would rather keep the difference written down.
The people who operate it decide whether the product exists
This is the oldest case in the portfolio and the one that most resembles what I do today. In an operations product, whether a store network, a support team or an internal dashboard at a large company, the person using the tool did not choose it and reads no tutorial. If the tool gets in the way of their work, they work around it, and the workaround becomes the real process.
That is why I treat adoption at the front line as a design requirement and not as a training topic. Training teaches people how to use something. Design removes the reason they were not going to use it.
