IKEA Contact us routing

Help users to help themselves, promote self-service and only if needed find out the best way to contact IKEA.

Photo by Ruslan Bardash on Unsplash

The project in short

The Contact us routing solution was designed and developed for IKEA* starting in winter 2021. In the project, my role as the only UX designer in the team included tasks such as:

UX research
Prototyping
User testing
UI design
Performance follow up
Presenting for management, introducing stakeholders etc

The user's mindset – "I need to contact IKEA"

There are multiple ways for a customer that has ordered something online to find out the status of an order:

follow the link in the order confirmation email
search for "order tracking IKEA" on Google
visit IKEA.com do a search
visit IKEA.com and browse

But users also end up in the mindset that they "need to contact" IKEA and start looking for contact details.

Showing contact options without knowing the user's intent

Steer users to the best contact method

Research showed that IKEA presented all contact details at once – without understanding the intent of the user. Showing multiple contact options such as call, chat, and social media caused a lot of contacts that added up to long queue times which made customers unhappy and frustrated.

If we could help users to help themselves, especially on more simple issues, it would free up time for co-workers to help out on more complex issues. Only if needed we could tell users how to contact IKEA.

This would in the end create more happy customers.

Organise topics based on "reasons for contact"

Based on findings from the result of a previous project, I had already defined seven main categories of the customer service section. In combination with insights into the top "reasons for contact", I conducted a tree test to find out if it would be possible for participants to connect the reasons for contact to one of the seven main categories.

With above 60% correct results the conclusion was that only minor details needed to be tweaked, such as duplicating issues into several relevant categories and highlighting one particular topic, which happened to be one of the top reasons for contact and where users had the right expectations (but that IKEA at the moment could not meet).

Prototyping and usertesting

I did several user tests of Figma prototypes in Userzoom to test the concept of getting recommendations on self-service tools or supporting webpages or if needed present the best way to reach out to IKEA.

Options are very clearly displayed.

Quite nice this panel-based thing.

Easy to navigate even for being the first time.

Participants in Userzoom test

A single page web app and a strategy

The single-page web app was key in the solution, but to make it work it needed a solid strategy to support it. Based on the contact us routing I put together recommendations on:

how to steer users from the customer service lobby and contact us page
how to "catch" users that could not find the wanted information on customer service subpages
how to remove specific contact methods and channels from other web pages and FAQ articles
how to improve external communication in emails, text messages, etc to not focus on "contact us" but rather "help you to help yourself"

Results from an IKEA perspective

From showing all contact options up front to instead bringing users into the contact us routing we could see:

80% drop in initiated calls from the Contact us page
a massive drop in exit and bounce rate that was interpreted as "hidden calls", i.e. users browse the page, see the phone number, and leave the page.
10% of the users that entered the contact us routing clicked on one of the recommended self-service solutions or recommended web pages.

Satisfaction with live chat was as high after the launch as before – despite the fact that users maybe was looking for phone number – and were offered chat

On a scale of 1-7, users answered on average 5.5 on the question "I would use this step-by-step solution again"

60% agree that "chat was a great way to get help for the reason they visited IKEA today"

On a scale of 1-7, users answered on average 5.4 on the question "I thought this step-by-step solution was easy to use"

Customer insight and feedback from survey

Get in touch

Galveston AB
Murbruksgatan 8
216 46 Limhamn
Sweden
Phone: +46732439720
Email: johan@galveston.se
LinkedIn: @galveston