Customer Experience Strategy: Research Outcomes

ASSESSMENT BRIEF 2
LANEIGE is a Korean cosmetic brand owned by Amore Pacific – the largest company in
the cosmetic industry in Korea. The brand LANEIGE is popular with its skin care products with
a worldwide network of stores and agents. LANEIGE entered the USA last year by exclusively
cooperating with 144 stores of Sephora – one of the largest multi-brand in the USA. Online
shopping is also available in this country. Therefore, customers in the USA can buy a product
of LANEIGE by going to a Sephora store or placing an order on their website at
https://us.laneige.com/. Recently, LANEIGE and its product brand have received many critical
reviews from customers complaining mostly about its quality as well as the poor customer
service. By conducting both primary survey and secondary methods, this research aims at
identifying customer’s satisfaction and getting deep insight into how to improve LANEIGE
business in the USA. The three main objectives of this research is to identify feedback on
product quality, feedback on customer service and the comparison between LANEIGE and
other competitors as perceived by the respondents.
LANEIGE’s products target at women aged 15 and over. Therefore, I surveyed people
who are in this group of target customers by sending the link to the online questionnaire to my
friends who are suitable. I also shared it on some social media channels including Facebook
and Twitter to ask for support from who previously had experience buying at least one product
of LANEIGE. This is an online survey designed with 15 questions. There are several questions
helping to filter out the most appropriate feedbacks from all the respondents based on criteria
including age, place of living, and the purchase frequency. 12 questions are classified into
three groups that can help to identify the exact issues of customer experience that LANEIGE
needs to improve. Besides primary research, I also conducted a secondary research to look
for other feedbacks and complaints related to LANEIGE customer experience. Firstly, I
analyzed their social media channels including Facebook and Twitter. Product reviews on e-
commerce websites such as Amazon.com are taken into consideration. As e-commerce is
becoming more important, I also took a visit to their website and pretended to be an online
customer to address any problems or difficulties that a normal customer might face when
purchasing a product on LANEIGN’s website.
The most commonly found issue is the latency in reply to customer’s complaint via email.
This caused very bad experience especially to those who first purchase products of LANEIGE.
Many customers find it difficult to reach out to this company for explanation and clarification.
Therefore, there many feedbacks rating the responsiveness of LANEIGE very low, around 2
– 3 points out of 5 points. The online purchasing process also needs to be improved. 45% of

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interviewees complaint that many online advertisements are causing misunderstanding. For
example, they did not receive any discount code for their order though they have registered
emails and the value of their order are over $25 as advertised. Nevertheless, most of the
respondents are satisfied with the product quality. They see skin care products of LANEIGE
are value for their money. According to the result of my primary, The most favorite products
are Water Sleeping Mask and Mini Pore Water clay Mask. Only one out of 10 respondents
reported to having a bad allergic reaction.
The secondary research shows me that there are many complaints about the allergic
reaction on their Facebook fan page but LANEIGE refused to take their products back. The
problems related to allergic reactions are obviously without their control because people can
be allergic to anything not only cosmetic products or LANEIGE’s products in specific.
However, it still causes a lot of unsatisfied customers and critical reviews on social media
channels. I figured out that LANEIGE leaves these complaints unanswered most of the time.
This bad impression can be spread out to many new customers as social networks are very
popular. Also, the interface of their website is not very user-friendly. From my secondary
research result, I found out that it takes more than 9 seconds to load the home page and more
than 15 seconds to load product pages on the average. These numbers for Sephora are 4
and 2 respectively. The loading page speed is also needed to be improved because low
loading speed can frustrate customers a lot (Bilgihan, Kandampully and Zhang, 2016). The
product description is very short and I could not find enough information related to the features
and benefits the product. The instrution or how-to-use description is quite sketchy. In my
opinion, the Sephora website does a better job when introducing the same product.
I set out three priorities that LANEIGE in the USA needs to improve in order to enhance
their customer experience. The first thing is to reduce the complaint related to latency in
responding to customer inquiries. According to Carnegie, Wilcox, and Zhu, that a company
fails to meet deadlines or leave their customer inquiries unanswered can increase customer
dissatisfaction and encourage them to look for alternatives from your competitors (Carnegie,
Wilcox and Zhu, 2008). If the customer responsiveness is a priority, the opportunities to serve
them increases while the problems decrease (Lai and Chang, 2013). Next, LANEIGE should
improve the user experience (UE) of the website. As Shopping online is becoming more
popular than ever with the increase in using mobile devices, understanding the most
appropriate way to serve customers on smartphone and tablet devices should be set as a
strategic priority for the business. The last thing that LANEIGE in the USA should deal with
complaints of customers on social media in the most professional manner. A research of
Grégoire, Salle, & Tripp emphasized that if customers do not receive any reply, the complaint

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will become worse and can be moved to a public domain, which in return could cause major
issues to the company. (Grégoire, Salle, & Tripp, 2014).
By conducting both primary and secondary research, this report has identified three main
problems that LANEIGE in the USA should be focused on in order to enhance their overall
customer experience.

List of references
1. Bilgihan, A., Kandampully, J. and Zhang, T. (2016). Towards a unified customer
experience in online shopping environments. International Journal of Quality and
Service Sciences, 8(1), pp.102-119.
2. Carnegie, B., Wilcox, R. and Zhu, T. (2008). Ignoring Your Best Customer?. Journal
of Relationship Marketing, 6(3-4), pp.87-116.
3. Grégoire, Y., Salle, A., & Tripp, T. M. (2014). Managing social media crises with your
customers: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Business Horizons, 58(2), 173–182.
4. Lai, Y. and Chang, S. (2013). How Improving the Customer Experience Quality and
Business Performance? A Case Study by Mystery Shopper Practices. International
Journal of Marketing Studies, 5(6).

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 Appendix
1. Research results
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PXCCJ7F0-
00oNu6AtxL8Gxezop3mlIe5GnADRJfGXQk/edit#gid=974729949
2. Link to online survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSez58QIkxYMwDdcL1F58d1co0SDPxvg
9pZebCGnjoyxV8Citg/viewform
3. Customer reviews on LANEIGE USA’s fan page

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