Defining the future of retail with the goal to increase sales across Tesco's multiple channels
Defining the future of retail with the goal to increase sales across Tesco's multiple channels
Tesco wanted to keep its F&F fashion brand at the forefront of consumers’ minds and secure competitive advantage by defining the future of retail with the goal to increase sales across multiple channels and boost brand perception.
Validation of business case
Seamless omni-channel experience
Future ready innovation roadmap
Goals
Validate digital transformation business case and access staff and customer appetite for technology adoption
Unify disparate technology trials and improve customer service delivery and access staff and customer appetite for technology adoption
Increase basket value, foot fall and reduce basket abandonment, grow online sales
Service Safari
We visited high street retail stores to observe customer behaviour and to establish the current digital innovation landscape.
Safari Synthesis
Collecting the evidence for change
Nationwide customer and staff interviews provided in-depth analysis into the current Tesco F&F customer journey experience and helped to assess customer’s and staff technology adoption and smart changing room concept readiness.
We developed customer and staff personas to support the creation of future journey scenarios and new service concepts.
Customer interviews & shadowing
Staff interviews & shadowing
Customer & staff segmentation & Personas
Current journey mapping
Primary research findings:
Future service users require;
/ Increase value of wardrobe
/ Support with fashion and style advice
/ Ability to build a fashion profile to receive style tips that can share with peers
/ A personalised service
/ Ability to self-serve
/ Access to discounts and rewards
/ Staff to become better customer service operatives and merchandisers
Solution
Demonstrating tangible customer & business value
We created animated and illustrated scenario stories that showed what seamless digital touchpoint engagement could look like in practice and demonstrated the benefits for customers, staff and the business.
Our research showed that Tesco had plenty of opportunity to lead with its smart changing room experience as part of a connected digital strategy.
We found that the innovations would improve customers’ perceptions of the service experience by offering increased support, reduced complexity and a responsive, personalised service. Customers would be empowered to self-serve, making it easier for them to create outfits, discover style tips, share with peers and purchase the complete range in-store (rather than having to go to shop online separately).
For Tesco, there would be real business benefits, including fewer abandoned purchases, improved cross-selling and up-selling and better brand perception and word of mouth.
The concept proved to have tangible staff and operational benefits too. We found that the smart changing rooms coupled with additional planned store innovations could improve customer relationships, boost staff time and productivity in the F&F department and streamline day-to-day tasks.
“Chris has a great understanding of user centered design and created some inspirational products for us to use in the future. His vision of a ‘Store of the Future’ was carefully considered and packaged with a detailed roadmap, packed full of strategic elements. This was made possible by Chris’ strong grasp of our brand. When I described our requirements he was able to immediately understand our business objectives and steer the product design to helping us to fulfil those targets.
Chris used research techniques and ideation workshops to ensure that we did not embark on any project without careful consideration. The projects were carefully measured so we could understand the success factors.
Chris was able to build strong relationships with my team and helped us all to be partners in the project. I have found his style and approach extremely helpful.”
Mapping the retail future
We created a roadmap for Tesco’s future digital innovations and business dependencies and defined the Minimal Viable Product experience so that Tesco could get the concept to market faster and use the pilot as an effective springboard into the future of retail.
The programme validated Tesco’s vision for the F&F brand, but it also uncovered some additional valuable innovations that the company could implement, adding further value to the end-to-end connected and smart retail experience.
What we learnt....
On reviewing the research our client said "do our customers struggle with the technology or just life in general". This project was as much about educating our client on value of using technology in the overall service experience, as much as it was about adapting the existing in-store touch-points to meet the needs of the customer, in context of their needs, mental models and behaviours.