International Supergrocer

The challenge

With customer shopping behaviours changing to smaller and more frequent shops and online grocery shopping driving customer’s expectations around choice and convenience online, the leadership need to build a longer-term perspective of the future shopping experience and what this would mean for their store formats and their online experience.

Running ahead of today’s customers

With the initiative being driven by the CMO, Engine were tasked with spearheading this ambitious programme by steering a multidisciplinary team, including service designers, retail designers, and digital UX specialists to develop a vision for grocer’s customer experience and then develop how it could be applied to their stores and online offer.

Building a 5-year CX vision that can be built

The ambition was to develop a CX vision that could scale across the different formats of store and one that would better cater for the new and emerging shopping habits that would offer a great experience both on and off-line and one that would become synonymous with the brand.

This ambitious scope was intended to have the following impact:

• To focus development effort and spend in the right places and avoid waste
• To have a single vision for a best-in-class customer experience across channels
• To define how we might remove barriers to purchase and increase basket size (spend per visit) and attract new customers
• To build out a concept that would be able to be piloted and used as a test and learn site to begin to embed elements of the design into the existing stores.

Collaboration and multi-disciplinary delivery across the business

Working alongside internal research, CX and Marketing teams, we used the existing data to build up an understanding of how customer experience the stores today and then fill in gaps in understanding of emerging habits, needs and behaviours by conducting interviews with customers in the key markets of UAE, KSA and Egypt and understand regional differences commonalities.

Building an ownable CX vision that shifts emphasis towards lifestyle

From this insight, we developed a scalable customer experience vision that’s aim was to provide simple, everyday solutions where the instore experience would offer a scalable experience optimised equally for convenience experience, bulk shopping and lifestyle experiences that were more critical for certain categories such as ‘fresh food’.

Underpinning the concept was a strong digital proposition that would be built upon the loyalty scheme data, stock and availability data and community data to offer a more personalised and real time customer journey that felt the same in very channel.

Aswell as grocers we drew on examples from other areas of retail to inspire a way to deliver a retail experience that could offer dedicated experiences and worked with our retail partner to redefine the category and space planning strategy in-line with the ambitious concept.

Co-presentation to the executive and building the case

The CX vision and design for the CX was delivered to the board, in response to their ambitious agenda. To support their decision making we developed an early business case for a pilot site with different options for executing it at different scales and locations across the Middle East for investment planning.