Exploration of a service for business customers
PLUS retail is a Dutch supermarket that is a cooperation of independent supermarket entrepreneurs, serviced by a Service Office in Utrecht. They offer the possibility to buy groceries off- and online. The same service for private and business customers.
Multiple entrepreneurs raised the question why there isn’t a distinction between these two customer groups. Especially for business customers, they are struggling to provide a good service because the assortment and process of ordering and payment are not sufficient. They receive a lot of complaints from business customers, and they see a lot these customers switch supermarket.
The question the service offices asked Capgemini: “Is it profitable to offer a separate service for business customers, and if so, what should this look like?”
Activities & Responsibilities
Project Management
This project was led by me. As a start I organized a kick-off to align all stakeholders from several departments to update them on the plans and approach of the project. During the project these stakeholders were updated on a weekly basis, so they knew what the latest status was. I did this via a few slides with a Gantt Chart.
Research & Analysis
The project started with a research phase where I performed field, market and customer research to gather insights to create an understanding of the as-is and to-be situation.
Desk research
The main goals for doing field research was to gather insights in the current service process of buying groceries instore and online. To get these insights, I spoke with the necessary retail departments at PLUS and with multiple supermarket entrepreneurs to discover their view on the current service, the moments of truth and the pain points. They also showed me where we might face problems when changing the process of online orders, adding additional assortment, changes in billing etc.
Market research
To find out what the competition is offering for their business users and what the future will hold, I did some market research. Therefore, I created a competitor analysis and trend analysis.
Customer research
The main goal of customer research is to find out what (PLUS) business customers think of the current service of ordering groceries in store and online and what they want to see differently. Research question I answered: ‘What is important for buying and ordering groceries and what can PLUS retail offer in this?’.
I started with qualitative research for which I interviewed 20 PLUS business customers (active PLUS customers and non-active PLUS customers) to gather insights into their current viewpoint of the PLUS service, drivers, moments of truth, pains, and gains. The main insights were validated with a quantitative study. This
For the qualitative research I designed a questionnaire that was send to a research pool of (ex) PLUS customers in all type of branches, different sizes. We got N=340 responses, which was big enough to get significant results. Next to the questionnaire output, I also did data analysis on order data of business customers to get a better understanding about their shopping behavior.
Analysis
All the research data was bundled and analysed into insights. I created personas based on their main drivers to get a better grip on the type of PLUS business customers, their journeys with motivations, pains and gains. Next to the journey, I also created a service blueprint to create additional insights in the processes that are attached to the several activities and touchpoints in the journey of the business customer.
Ideation (workshop)
With the gathered research insights in mind, I organized several workshops with the main stakeholders (Buying, product/category management, store operations, eCommerce operations, eCommerce Manager, and a selection of entrepreneurs etc) and the current eCommerce supplier to do a brainstorm on how we could turn these insights into relevant (online) adjustments for these business customers.
From a bunch of ideas, we converged to a selection of ideas, by plotting all the ideas in a matrix of effort versus impact.
Creating a business case
The insights from research, including the ideas, were the fundament for the Business case. This case was created by Business Control and was presented to the Management Team (MT) by Business Control, the eCommerce Manager and myself. We got a ‘go’ for adding additional online functionality and offering bulk packaging, but not on specialty assortment because that wasn’t profitable for PLUS at that moment in time. The latter would be more suitable for a collaboration with Kruidvat for example.
Prototyping & Design
After we got a ‘go’, I sat down together with a UX designer to think of several UX designs for the ideas we had. I created the wireframes and the UX designer the actual prototypes which we tested with real PLUS business customers.
Next to the online changes, we did a pilot with an order with bulk packaging. This was a real challenge. Especially because each PLUS supermarket handles online orders in store instead of a distribution centre. All stock (including online orders) come in at once and it is hard for store employees to distinguish between stock for online orders and stock for instore. Bulk packaging is also taking a lot of space, not only in each store, but also for delivery. To do this pilot we had to simulate some changes in the necessary systems (ERP, stock picking app, delivery planning app).
After prototyping and testing, we got one design for the necessary changes for web, app and other PLUS systems. The results from the tests gave us enough input to collaboratively create user stories out of the designs that were adjusted to the backlog of the necessary departments.
Implementation / Result
The research offered interesting insights, some of which contradict previous assumptions of both entrepreneurs and the service office about necessary service adjustments. 65% of the PLUS business customers were content with the current grocery service. Only the large business customers weren’t content. They were missing the option to have multiple accounts for one organization, the option to create master and sub-accounts, budget configurations per account, OCI-linkage, bulk assortment etc. Another interesting finding was the fact that we also gathered insights that were also of interest for private users.
When I left, bulk packaging was added to the assortment. For this we made the necessary changes to the systems. Other parts were waiting on the backlog for IT to pick them up. Due to a large ERP implementation that was delayed it took a bit longer than expected.