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Getting product answers closer to the source

I developed the Ulta Beauty Brand Expert Program so brands could answer customers’ questions directly. An internal workaround became a PowerReviews pilot and eventually Brand Engage.

Replies typically arrived within 24 hours, down from around 72, in my recollection of running the program. Customers could identify badged brand answers, and I spent less time chasing and relaying responses.

My role: Created the program, configured the initial workflow and access, wrote guidelines and training materials, and brought the constraints to PowerReviews.

Partners: Brand representatives supplied product expertise. PowerReviews partnered on the pilot and developed the platform feature.

The working brief

The problem: Customers waited while I contacted a brand representative and relayed the answer back.

The proposed solution: Give brands a direct route to their own product questions, with helpful response guidelines and clear identification of who was answering.

Primary success measure: Time to a useful customer reply.

Secondary success measure: Manual coordination needed to get that reply to the customer.

These were the aims of a workflow improvement and product pilot, rather than a controlled A/B test.

I knew the bottleneck because I was in it

For a couple of years, I was the voice of Ask Ulta on our product detail pages. Sometimes I knew the answer. Often, the brand had the knowledge and I was the person in the middle.

I added brand representatives as users in our PowerReviews account, with question queues specific to their own brand. I created the workflow, permissions, guidelines, and training documents so they could answer directly, without a response-by-response review from me.

The workaround had limits: representatives had broader reporting access than I wanted, their queue was difficult to find after login, and I still assigned every question manually.

Make the answer worth the customer’s time

The guidelines covered voice and what made an answer helpful. If someone supplied the name and shade of a foundation they already used, I asked representatives to do their best to suggest a match. Simply sending that person to a store left the original question unanswered.

Turn the workaround into a product conversation

I showed PowerReviews what I was doing and where it fell short. They agreed to a pilot that addressed reporting-access boundaries, automatic routing, and a simpler path to the brand’s question queue. It eventually became Brand Engage.

Direct, badged answers gave customers a clearer source and freed more of my time. I eventually transitioned off Ask Ulta into a dedicated UX role.

The questions also showed us what the page was missing

When we first added Q&A, product size wasn’t listed as metadata. Customers had to zoom in on packaging photographs and hope they could find the ounces there. Often, they couldn’t.

Adding size as a field was one of the quickest improvements we made after launch. The information belonged on the page, where everyone could find it.

In hindsight, answering Ask Ulta felt like one very, very long study of our product pages. Over time, customers kept showing us what they needed and where we were making them work too hard.

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