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Building Empathy with Wayfair Suppliers

Businesses have traditionally faced many unique complexities that make understanding their motivations a challenging task — things like product complexity, multiple users with different needs within a single organization and a more involved path to purchase, make it difficult to understand purchase journeys.

At Wayfair, we realized that to create an improved experience for our end customers within a two-sided e-commerce marketplace, we need to improve the experience for businesses that sell home goods online to end customers, using Wayfair’s e-commerce platform (“Wayfair Suppliers”). Understanding what motivates our Wayfair Suppliers emotionally, beyond the transactional bottom line, has a material impact on the customer experience along with creating operational efficiencies. With this challenge in mind, and our goal of improving the experience for businesses that sell on Wayfair, we knew we needed to understand them more and build empathy for them so we could help them with their user needs.

Here’s how we scaled up our empathy building for Wayfair Suppliers over a year:

• Conducted a segmentation exercise of our Wayfair Suppliers, to understand their key firmographics and technographics. We sent out an online survey to all Suppliers to collect information about their firmographics, such as: size, employee count, geographic location, whether they are a distributor or manufacturer, whether they own their own warehouses, job role of the Supplier and frequency of usage of the e-commerce platform. We then clustered responses that were similar and created three segments for all responses. This allowed us to understand the different needs of Wayfair Suppliers according to their company size, headquarters’ location and business model (distributor or manufacturer). When a new Supplier sets up to sell on Wayfair, we have an understanding of their business needs and can send them relevant and personalized communications and insights. This has helped improve Supplier satisfaction and loyalty, particularly among the smaller businesses selling on Wayfair. This exercise was conducted by one researcher and an external market research company, over three months.
• Engaged business customers in online discussions, using an ethnographic board called Recollective. We had them submit a series of online tasks to understand why they use Partner Home and what business objectives they are trying to accomplish. This allowed for deeper understanding of user sentiment and motivations to unpack the quantitative data. Two researchers facilitated and set up these tasks online with Suppliers over a three-week period.
• Developed stories and narratives about our buyers, by engaging with subject matter experts in particular areas of the business (Director of Supplier Marketing, Design & Product Managers); so that we can understand the emotional drivers behind buyers’ decisions. This enabled stakeholder buy-in and support for improved UI.

Here are the results we achieved:

1. Understanding why our business customers use our platform enabled us to be more focused on priority areas, versus new features. For example, the research identified that ‘Improving Listings’ is a key job that our customers want to complete on Wayfair and is highly underserved. ‘Build the Best Listing’ has been prioritized in the Global Supplier Technology Roadmap for H2 2022, with respect to improving the Product Addition experience. This type of thinking powers all of our business decisions, with a deep understanding of our B2B customers, charting a new way of working to fuel our success.
2. Understanding why home goods manufacturers and distributors sell on Wayfair enabled us as a business to create an experience vision of an enterprise application. The Supplier Vision, led by experience design, was achieved by working across a large, cross-functional design sprint over 6 weeks, with 40+ Global Supplier Tech team members and business partners actively participating, to arrive at the north star vision for Wayfair Suppliers.

When you are faced with any complexity, ultimately understanding the human behavior underpinned by empathy is the key driving force to inform decisions. Approaches that worked in the past may not be the right path forward. Understanding the why behind a customer’s behavior and even usage of a platform/tool/experience, is crucial to informing what they need.

Understanding this ‘why’ will also help us create a unique, compelling and relevant value proposition for Wayfair. Understanding why Suppliers consider Wayfair over other platforms can provide us with a point of differentiation and gives guidance on marketing and promotional activities to optimize conversions.

Not only was this exercise to build empathy with our Wayfair Suppliers crucial for the success of our experience, but it was crucial for the ways the team worked together to deliver on that improved experience, generating empathy for each other on the team.

Lessons Learnt From This Experience:

“Keep in mind:” When understanding your customer, it’s crucial to break it down into a digestible format to have the research make sense to all stakeholders. A segmentation exercise may be a useful framework to leverage.

“Hot Tip:” When understanding your customer, it’s important not to just talk to them, but observe them. We engaged ten Wayfair Suppliers in online tasks and viewed their reactions and emotions with respect to Wayfair, using an online platform.

“Top Suggestion:” People engage with stories versus descriptions. Enable stakeholders to walk in the shoes of your user by developing narratives and stories that resonate.

When you build empathy with customers, you build better experiences for them. Let’s understand each other deeper so experiences can be successful in getting the desired task job done, in a happy and delightful way.

Ria Goculdas is currently Associate Director for User Research at Global Supplier Technology

About Wayfair’s Global Experience Design Community

Global Experience Design at Wayfair is a cross-disciplinary function including product design, user research, and content strategy. We create experiences for all of our end-users, including suppliers, customers, agents, field champions, and internal employees. The Wayfair experience supports our mission to be the destination for all things home, helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.