ECOM recently sponsored the latest UX Crunch talk into the digital experience of retail giants Sainsbury’s. Being a preferred supplier of UX, Design and Development talent to the company, we thought it was fitting to see how the advice of none other than tech behemoth Google has developed Sainsbury’s into a digital powerhouse.
Google's first bit of advice was that to excel in the digital world they must have a specialist team in place. Having started the digital experience under the stewardship of Charlotte Briscoll, Sainsbury’s team has gone from a small huddle of desks on the 5th floor to its own digital experience lab in the basement of its HQ in Holborn.
First on the agenda was how to build a brilliant customer experience delivered by Clare Muscutt of the customer experience team. She explained how “Sainsbury’s is breaking down barriers between channels and joining the dots for customers, using service design”. Sainsbury’s wants its customers to be able to love the way they shop, whether this is to ensure the quality of its products are of the highest standard or that if a customer doesn’t have the ability to walk around its stores, they ensure their shopping is delivered to the best of its ability.
How does digital fit into all this? Surely it is just a case of making sure logistics are right within the capabilities of its warehouses and delivery drivers? This is far from the reality - Martin White, Lead Design Manager, was on hand to quantify how Sainsbury’s is ensuring that the digital aspect is their primary way of delivering this.
Martin opened his talk with an anecdote illustrating just how much Sainsbury’s cares about its customers. Whilst all other retailers consider a lady with severe obsessive compulsive disorder too much trouble to serve, Sainsbury’s ensures it’s still committed to its customers and that any shopper isn’t too much trouble for them. For this particular lady, orders must be placed on the kitchen table in a particular position and nothing must touch the floor or she’ll refuse the order. A difficulty in the business than Sainsbury's went to great lengths in order to accommodate.
Alongside this example, Martin used a number of case studies to show how Digital is starting to develop its main strategy. The first was a new, digital focussed take on shopping for the Christmas period. Sainsbury's turned its Christmas catalogue into digital only wherein customers could order and reserve food without going into a store - leading to a 20% uplift in sales.
The secod case study was all about driving change following the introduction of regulations that limited the hours Sainsbury’s drivers could work - a new shift system had to be introduced. Drivers previously used a laborious, paper-based system to book time slots as they tried to meet customer demand. In order to combat this, Sainsbury’s designed a new digital product to enable the ease of booking shifts easy.
Finally, the third was all about Smartshop, a new digital platform that involved changing the layout of physical stores and checkout options, as well as creating an app that made shopping and checking out, easier and quicker.
Jaskharan Shoker, UX Designer at Sainsbury’s, then discussed the how anticipatory design focusses on what Sainsbury’s knows its users will need and/or want. Shoker used Netflix and Spotify as a prime example; both having vast entertainment libraries on offer for its customers which realistically won’t be used by the average customer. These services collect information that helps them predict what you might want or like as a customer from its sign up page. That way, making a decision becomes easier and finding what you want becomes a much more user friendly process.
The final talk of the night was all from Krzysztof Zawadzki, Analytics lead at Sainsbury’s. He spoke about how you can combine qualitative and quantitative data to create a tool that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Having this detailed and quality data about its users allows Sainsbury’s to make very informed decisions about its UX moving forward.
It was great to learn more about one of our partners and how it has immersed itself into having the customer at the very forefront of what it does and being able to utilise digital into doing this. To learn more about Sainsbury’s or even to get involved in their digital evolution, get in touch today.
Jake Ailion - Account Manager, Clientside Creative
