Case Study: Co-Creating A More Meaningful Online Home-Buying Experience

THE CHALLENGE

Buying a home is the biggest investment most of us make; it can be a daunting and emotional process. What’s more, many feel they are not able to finance a home. Clayton Homes ®, a Berkshire Hathaway ® company and national builder of attainable housing, knew how people shop for homes is changing.They wanted to develop a meaningful online shopping experience that not only helps people overcome the barriers to homeownership, but also help them design a home built to fit their life.

THE SOLUTION

Leverage Stone Mantel’s foundational data to better understand changing needs and attitudes, and work with teams across Clayton Homes to ideate new home- buying experiences for co-creation and quantitative testing.

THE GOAL

To create a roadmap for a new home-buying journey that blends in-person and digital experiences and tools. A secondary goal was to elevate collaboration across the organization to foster greater innovation.

THE PROCESS

Preliminary research and discovery

Bootcamp sessions provided foundational learnings; looking at previous research gave Clayton Homes insights into the customer journey, including new metrics for experiences. First-round qualitative research uncovered customer home- buying roadblocks that were easy for Clayton Homes to solve. Quantitative research validated those findings, empowering the team to move forward.

Testing a customer journey

Our initial research findings informed a new end-to-end discovery and shopping experience that was then co-created with customers. Together we designed an improved way for customers to engage with Clayton Homes and navigate the home-buying process. The co-creation and quantitative research delivered a proof of concept and identified milestones to reach.

Internal collaboration

Pulling together representation from disparate departments— finance, digital, marketing, retail, manufacturing, innovation, and customer insights—exposed teams to different points of view and enabled holistic thinking that led to a more robust roadmap.

THE RESULTS

Co-creating a roadmap

They are using the co-creation research as a guide across
the organization for building out a better digital shopping experience. Clayton Homes is creating a knowledge base for customers to explore and become more informed—and more likely to buy an off-site built home.

Improving engagement, empowering customers

Inspired by the value of ideas received from customers, Clayton Homes is starting a new “voice of the customer“ listening program to gain additional insights.

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