Nutrien Customer Experience Strategy

Rethinking a customer experience strategy to grow customer relations using thoughtful research and collaborative ideation.
Product Strategy
User Research
Visual Design

details

Duration

12 weeks

Role

Experience design, user research, visual design, product strategy, product management

Team

Experience Designer, Business Analyst, CX Design Lead

Tools

Figma, Sketch, Mural, Keynote

project

Challenge

Nutrien is known to be one of the most reliable suppliers for their customers in wholesale agriculture, but lagged behind competitors’ digital platforms in functionality and usability. Nutrien needed help understanding their customers to provide more value and enhance satisfaction while finding ways to streamline business operations.

Summary

Nutrien, a multi-billion company, collaborated with a small team from IBM iX, to develop a digital customer experience strategy to improve customers’ businesses and relations with Nutrien.

Following a user-centric mindset, the team crafted a vision by interviewing 40+ users, generating 14+ initiatives using design thinking, and delivering a roadmap across three years. This strategy directed the product team to bring the vision to life.

Contributions

As an Experience Designer in a small team, I co-led a research plan, facilitated a design thinking workshop, and managed project timelines. I analyzed interviews to map customer interactions, designed personas to represent customers’ needs, defined a matrix to prioritize initiatives, designed vignettes envisioning a future experience, and created a roadmap integrating initiatives.

Overview

We used an outside-in approach to understand users’ pain points and customers’ needs when using digital tools to manage their business and collaborate with Nutrien.

Approach

We approached this challenge in five steps:

Empathize with users

Understand the current state by interviewing customers, Nutrien sales, customer success, and stakeholders.

Ideate with design thinking

Generate ideas for an ideal customer experience in a design thinking workshop aligned to research insights.

Refine insights

Interview customers to craft personas and expand ideas as initiatives.

Prioritize initiatives

Rank initiatives on customer impact, business value, and technical feasibility.

Envision a future

Articulate a seamless and user-friendly vision with a visualized story.

Continuous feedback

Evolve artifacts with frequent feedback loops from Nutrien.

RESULTS

We developed a 3-year roadmap incorporating customer insights, user-requested features, and existing enterprise infrastructure. This directed the product team to bring the vision to life by building a new digital customer experience platform.
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Thoughtful user research across 40+ interviews enhanced customer empathy

We synthesized hundreds of data points from interviews and workshops with customers, sales, customer success, and stakeholders.

Collaborative ideation prioritized 14 initiatives across three years

We defined a digital customer experience strategy for 3 personas, with 14 initiatives visualized in a story and roadmap.
View video

research

Understanding user needs

We interviewed 31 Nutrien staff across sales, customer success, and stakeholders who represented customers’ needs.
We considered the personas’ needs, customer experience drivers, and existing infrastructure to design a user-friendly experience.

Design Thinking

Conceptualizing ideas

The previous artifacts helped shaped value statements, enabling 30 participants to empathize with a customer profile and generate solutions in an 8-hour design thinking workshop.
Participants sketched ideas, then voted on the highest customer and business value. We refined these into 14 initiatives with capabilities, impact, and technical considerations with existing Nutrien infrastructure and projects.
Since the design thinking process was new for many participants, I kept the following facilitation tips in mind:
  • Increase comfort level when generating ideas by exposing participants to brainstorming exercises
  • Ensure ideas are valued by capturing every discussion on stickies — refine ideas later
  • Generate more discussion by reading aloud a sticky or asking relevant questions
  • Cultivate inclusivity by remembering names, requesting vocal participants to write ideas, and encouraging quiet speakers to share ideas
I was very impressed with Carrie’s ability to facilitate Design Thinking. She was very comfortable and led her group well.

Alison Cox, Team Lead

Executive Consultant at IBM iX

Personas

Expanding customer profiles

After the design thinking workshop, we interviewed 12 customers, capturing pain points, interactions, and ideas to address their frustrations.
We learned that customers were satisfied with the quality of service when addressing payment detail requests or issues but felt existing tools lagged behind competitors. They lacked self-serve abilities for task completion, including accessing documents, ordering products, and viewing delivery logistics.

“It’s like there’s a curtain between us, and we have to yell over the curtain to ask Nutrien what they see from their side.”
We identified key customer characteristics and represented the broadest and most complex scenarios as three personas.
Patricia from Procurement stays on top of the business by planning and sourcing inventory.
Len from Logistics & Operations manages and replenishes product inventory, coordinating warehouse and product logistics.
Andrew from Accounts Payable manages the overall account and needs traceability and organization.
The 40+ interviews helped identify five customer experience drivers to ensure every initiative delivers customer value and three business values to deliver impact across customer satisfaction, productivity, and revenue growth.

Prioritize

Defining a product roadmap

When discussing each initiative, we used a matrix based on the desirability, viability, and feasibility framework to assist in discussions with the product team and stakeholders.
We prioritized 14 initiatives based on the highest customer and business value with minimal technical limitations.
We mapped the initiatives across a three-year roadmap focused on growing customer experience and business impact.

Storyboard

Imagining a new vision

We visualized the roadmap as a narrative using medium-fidelity vignettes.
We considered the personas’ needs, customer experience drivers, and existing infrastructure to design a user-friendly experience.

Solution

With thoughtful user research and collaborative ideation, we identified value-generating opportunities.

Know who customers are

Problem: Customers navigate several outdated platforms to obtain information, missing a complete view of their relationship with Nutrien.
Solution: Empower customers to make informed decisions on purchases and operations. With complete control over their account and shipment information, customers can stay on top of their business with Nutrien.

Keep customers informed

Problem: Customers have no information to day-to-day logistics on inventory shipments, product availability, and outage notifications.
Solution: Present customers updated information, interruption alerts, and shipment tracking. With more transparency, customers can make proactive decisions and quickly resolve issues.

Enable customer access

Problem: Customers rely heavily on Nutrien since they cannot find information or complete tasks with existing digital tools.
Solution: Enable customers to self-serve wherever they are, at any time. With a new digital experience, customers can access documents, complete tasks independently, and improve workflows to manage their business.

Outcomes

With a digital customer experience strategy focused on users, customers can have peace of mind growing their business with Nutrien.
With an enhanced experience that increases customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, Nutrien can build trusted relationships with its customers and become a leader in the agriculture wholesale business.
Carrie was able to provide structure to a project with a lot of moving parts and was able to successfully manage project timelines and activities. She kept the project on track and well organized.

Alison Cox, Team Lead

Executive Consultant at IBM iX

Reflection

Not everything went according to plan, but we did the best we could with the resources we had.

Sharing work-in-progress

With minimal industry experience and a new client, the team gradually strengthened client relations. By sharing in-depth notes and in-progress analyses with the client, we helped simplify complex processes and address knowledge gaps.

Maximizing time with customers

We focused on interviewing Nutrien staff during initial discovery, as customers were busy managing their businesses. We obtained background information so that during customer interviews, we were prepared to get their perspective on their partnership with Nutrien, competitors, and potential ideas to address their pain points.

Kind words

Feedback on my contributions from talented team members who I had the pleasure of working with.
Our team is very fortunate to have Carrie. One thing I really like about Carrie is her willingness to ask for more. Whether it's offering to take on extra tasks to help speed up the team's work or seeking advice and opportunity to learn and practice something new … Carrie has done a fantastic job collaborating with the rest of the team to deliver the best result possible.

Huiwen Ji, Collaborator

Senior UX & UI Designer at IBM iX

I am very impressed with how Carrie took feedback and applied it right away. I felt like she was always open to feedback and tried to apply new ways of working. She is a very reliable team member - and does so with a smile on her face and great demeanour.

Alison Cox, Team Lead

Executive Consultant at IBM iX

Key project contributors
Huiwen Ji, Experience Designer
Cindy Soerensen, Business Analyst
Alison Cox, CX Design Lead
Elmien Dicker, Account Partner Executive

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