Project Overview

It was gratifying to be a part of Airgas’ new venture into digital by way of forming a completely new digital eCommerce group. The team was a combination of Airgas employees and digital consultants. This was not only a transformation for Airgas, it was for me as well. I completely had to re-orient my approach from designing for the external customer in mind to recognizing and embracing everyone as the customer. We were embarking on creating a digital business that by the way sold products online. For me this translated into designing for business to help save operational cost, increase customer satisfaction and attribute to sales.

During my tenure on this project I hired a team of writers and designers while leveraging internal associates to support content publishing, project management and user research.

Challenge

Omni-Channel is here!

It was extremely important to connect their digital eCommerce offering with their 1000+ branches, distribution centers, sales and telesales channels and lead the future growth of the company. Going with an omni-channel strategy was critical to their future success.

The first phase toward an omni-channel future was to clear up linear channel issues and begin their journey to providing a great multi-channel offering. Reconstructing Airgas’ eCommerce offering was the most important place to start. The objective here was to retain existing customers while growing a new customer base by:

  • Making it easier to do business online
  • Improve customers ability to find and order products
  • Expand account self-service functionality
  • Provide a wider range of company information and product resources that engage existing and attract new customers
Customer Desires

Give me a high-touch experience online too

Airgas has built their brand approach based on providing a high-touch experience. We interviewed internal stakeholders, customer service and sales representatives and strategic account customers and created an affinity diagram through multiple work sessions. By doing this we learned key areas of improvements.

view the brief
Deliverables

A cross-channel, multi-market experience

One of the most crucial experience goals was to provide a responsive designed  eCommerce solution to reach customer in all capacities, but it was just as important to provide an easy way to adopt internal and external customers to a new way of doing business. Awareness and adoption digital marketing campaigns helped arm sales associates, call-centers, distribution centers and employees with instruction and communications materials and ongoing communications on a regular basis.

Deliverables include:

  • Experience research and design artifacts
  • Responsive UI design solutions
  • Design specifications and style guides
  • Transactional and promotional emails
  • Internal and customer facing communication alerts, collateral
  • Creative marketing campaign theme and journey
  • Traditional media: Ads, direct mail, in-store displays, invoice inserts, cylinder tags, corporate and hold messaging
  • Digital media: Display and retargeting ads, landing pages, slideware, promotional videos, video tutorials, post-acquisition emails