What Arco wanted

With a functional but dated ecommerce site not available to all customers, costly printed brochures and a busy customer services helpdesk, Arco wanted to elevate the customer experience for business large and small, via a new digital presence that would:

• Allow all customers to browse its entire range of products.
• Enable customers to tailor suitable ranges of products based on their specific needs
• Deliver a slick, streamlined customer experience that empower customers to place and manage orders with ease.
• Improve self-service and reduce print costs to cut the cost of growth.

Arco appointed Biglight to create a new, customer-centric digital presence thanks to our success in helping brands like Screwfix and the Kingfisher Group create and optimise their B2B channels across Europe.

What we did

Success would depend on building a deep understanding of customer needs – from the practical to the emotional. This insight would ensure that the new website design delivered a customer-focused experience while aligning with a new brand look and feel and meeting the latest usability and accessibility standards across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

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Customer research

We repurposed Arco’s existing research, engaged with account management teams, customer service agents and product specialists, and completed bespoke customer research - to understand who Arco’s customers are and the needs of the specific roles within those businesses.

Experience design

We used this insight to design a new digital look and feel for Arco. Taking design cues from polished direct to consumer sites, it features core functionality that makes it easy to find products, compare alternatives and explore product features and benefits. The site supports product evaluation via user generated content and social proof - and enables customers large and small to complete tasks and transactions quickly and easily.

The new site supports personalised experiences tailored to role-based customer needs and provides features and tools to support product category-specific technical requirements.

• Displaying bespoke, customer-specific ranges and pricing.
• Surfacing helpful technical and inspirational content across the customer journey.
• Introducing a simple input order form allowing admins to place repeat bulk orders, supported by csv upload functionality or integration with internal systems.
• Reporting and budgeting tools, to allow customers to report on product spend and usage by location and product type.
• Tools to demystify technical specification and ease product selection.
• Integrated safety advice, based on new product innovation, weather conditions, and changes in safety regulations.

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Services we delivered

• Held collaborative discovery workshops with Subject Matter Experts specialists to understand customers and product category-specific technical needs
• Completed Expert Review of the existing site to identify the most successful components
• Completed Landscape Review to identify opportunities for the new site
• Engaged with Subject Matter Experts and completed our own research to understand more about customer needs.
• Developed personas to clarify specific roles within customer organisations
• Created a new look and feel and digital styleguide for Arco, based on the brand guidelines and aligned to the businesses’ accessibility requirements
• Produced more than 100 high-fidelity interactive wireframes, associated with over 900 user stories
• Completed the full visual design of the new site, including navigational components, interaction designs, whilst accommodating multiple statuses.
• Engaged with Subject Matter Experts and Key Stakeholders throughout and worked closely with internal and third-party product teams.