A supermarket brand focused on customer-centric service delivery
Proudly New Zealand owned and operated, Foodstuffs is New Zealand’s biggest grocery distributor. The company is best known for its major retail brands - PAK’nSAVE, New World and Four Square. For more than 90 years, Foodstuffs has continually designed and developed its customer experience to meet changing needs.
This focus on customer-centred innovation led New World to develop their new Zoom Trolley. It has a built-in app, screen and barcode scanner, so customers can:
Create a positive customer experience, improve operational performance and embed a customer-centric product development lifecycle
Introducing a new approach to something as familiar as supermarket shopping requires careful planning, testing and development. There’s little customer tolerance for anything less than a frictionless experience with immediate and desirable benefits. To generate a return on investment beyond customer approval, the innovation must improve operational performance.
Customer-centric design using operational staff pilots, plus customer testing, interviews and surveys
To ensure the project met the joint demands of customer expectations and improved business performance, we helpedFoodstuffs introduce a customer-centric approach to their product development.This was achieved by designing and executing a series of user experience research activities, then translating the results into clear and concise insights for the project team. The insights were used to make Zoom Trolley improvements between each round of research and development.
To help assess the Zoom Trolley experience from a business operations perspective, we carried out user experience interviews and ‘shop alongs’ with staff from Foodstuffs and New World.
We conducted mock shops at two New World stores, where customers were asked to come prepared to complete their main weekly shop. We observed customers as they shopped and facilitated one-to-one interviews both before and after they’d completed their shop. The interviews allowed us to understand how they felt about the overall experience and why.
We turned the resulting customer insights into actionable recommendations for addressing usability issues in the following areas:
Based on insights from the previous rounds, the project team made form factor improvements to the Zoom Trolley, enhanced the on-boarding process and enabled connection with the New World phone app for a more integrated customer experience.
We also helped define four clear stages for the Zoom Trolley experience.
To learn how customers felt during each of the four stages, we conducted one-to-one interviews before and after each shop at two New World stores. Follow-up surveys were sent the next day to customers who participated in ‘mock shops’ across both New World stores.
Improved customer and business outcomes from user experience research
By the end of the third round, the following customer value drivers were becoming apparent.
At the conclusion of the enggement the following business outcomes were delivered:
I have been impressed by the depth of experience Purple Shirt have shown throughout this engagement providing significantly more value than customer survey capability. Their skill is in identifying points of friction through observation, even where the customer could not articulate it and we might have missed it. I have valued Steve’s counsel on how to develop a truly customer driven product and will not hesitate to engage Purple Shirt in the future.
