Sainsbury's

Developing in-house customer experience design capability

The challenge

For over 70 years, Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s ‘Big 4’ supermarkets, has been at the forefront of redefining everyday shopping experiences. From pioneering the shift to self-service to rethinking supermarket layouts and formats, they’ve consistently catered for changing customer needs and set a benchmark for UK retail.

But as competition increased in the UK from traditional supermarkets, low-cost European entrants, and online retailers, Sainsbury's realised they needed to compete on their experience as much as their prices.

We worked with Sainsbury's to define and deliver a CX vision and translate that into a transformation programme that would shape the customer experience design.

Defining what 'Live Well for Less' means for the experience now and in the future

Despite significant investment in gathering customer data, Sainsbury’s realised they needed to shift from fixing customer issues as they arose. They needed a vision for how their customer experience could support their brand promise of ‘Live Well for Less’, both now and in the future.

Sainsbury's wanted to retain its strong brand positioning built on delivering everyday quality and affordable luxuries in groceries, while exploring how ‘Live Well for Less’ could evolve to include non-food products, service and use of technology.

Engine partnered with Sainsbury’s to build a compelling vision for the customer experience and define what it should mean for their stores, online products, customer service and the wider offer. The vision also needed to support Sainsbury’s expansion into non-food categories, integrating other brands and store formats.

Breakthrough

With shopping habits changing so much, we had to move away from the idea of there being a single customer journey. Customers were mixing and matching how they shopped, switching between digital and physical channels, and sometimes using both at once. The experience needed to reflect that reality.

Helping internal teams put customers at the heart of what they do

With customers no longer following predictable daily or weekly shopping habits, it had become harder than ever for Sainsbury’s to understand if they were catering for their customers' needs and the ways they shopped.

They recognised that the current retail experience worked for today, but they didn’t have a shared view on what the future experience should be, or how they needed to evolve to meet it.

As part of developing the vision and making it usable, we worked with insight teams across the business to draw on existing data, spent time on the shop floor with customers and explored emerging trends to create a new, unified set of customer profiles reflecting their core needs, wants and behaviours.

As part of reimagining the ‘Live Well for Less’ vision, we helped build CX design capabilities across internal teams. This helped them align the business to a single customer vision and create a unified language to describe who they were designing for. This helped connect activity across the organisation, so every decision could support the customer experience.

This included developing:

Now and Next customer personas
A redefined customer journey – viewed through the customer’s lens, not Sainsbury’s
Key customer missions
Customer needs and behaviours mapped to the service propositions and channels

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Ensuring Sainsbury's was catering for everyone

A key part of the work focused on making sure the experiences we designed and developed were accessible to all. Rather than treating customers with additional needs as a separate group, we developed accessibility guidelines that would improve the experience for everyone. These were built into the CX toolkit, giving internal teams practical ways to design with inclusion in mind.

Using the vision to design and deliver improvements to today's experience

With the vision and the customers clearly defined, we supported Sainsbury’s internal teams to apply them in real in-store and online experiences.

Each mini project was delivered in collaboration with internal teams, demonstrating how to use the CX toolkit in practice and giving people first-hand experience of what a customer experience design project looks and feels like.

Initiatives included:

Redesigning Sainsbury’s café and counter experiences
Reimagining the future format of stores
Defining ‘Distinctly Sainsburys’ customer service behaviours and actions
Developing the product strategy and roadmap for the Smart Shopping application

Breakthrough

Sainsbury’s retained its front-line staff far longer than most other retailers. Customers didn’t just recognise the brand, they returned for the people. We worked with those super-star team members to understand how they built rapport and turned that into training, so great service could be delivered consistently.