Technology to increase loyalty and business for Grocery stores

Grocery shopping is an unavoidable necessity, and many of us hate sparing our already scarce “free time” on it. In olden days the small town grocer knew almost everybody by name and their preferences. They were also able to ready the goods for pickup, even deliver, when they were informed in advance of the shopping list. In certain countries even today, you can call, (yes, and even email) a neighborhood grocer with your list and they can deliver it to your door.  Fortunately this (and more) is possible in the US with today’s technology. Therein lies a great opportunity for large grocery chains to redefine the customer experience with the help of new technologies such as mobile and social commerce. Here is a manifestation of such a solution:

Most customers usually buy certain quantities of groceries regularly.  A loyalty application can track this behavior and prepare a “shopping list” by predicting what each customer might buy on any given day based on historical and seasonal data. The list might include some upsell /cross sell suggestions as well. For customers who have opted into receiving an email, this list can be sent (pushed) to the consumers, with a “call to action” for “buying” the items on the list (with an option for the customer to edit the list on their phone or computer). Customers also will have the option to pick it up themselves or have it delivered. The earliest expected times for each option are also displayed based on the customer’s profile (address, customer’s preferred timings), store SLAs etc.  Customers and their shopping lists are organized by family /household so an authorized spouse /partner can edit items on the list.

The store associates would know a customer entered the store in one (or both) of two ways. For customers with a GPS enabled smart phone, a pre-installed loyalty app detects proximity of the store and informs customer service. For other (regular) customers a loyalty card, with an RFID tag embedded in it can do the trick with the help of sensors at the doors.  An associate monitoring the “arrivals”, gets the pre bagged order up to the designated pickup counter. A personalized greeting script with a cross sell /upsell list is also made available for the associate who greets the customer by name and shows the recommended products / new arrivals to the customer to inquire if they are interested. The customer has to just sign their  credit card payment slip. This is a radically improved experience than what consumers are used to today and has the following benefits.

For the consumer:

• The focus here is on saving every second of the customer’s time and effort: No need to browse around the store and add items to cart, if you know exactly what you want.
• Pertinent and timely information to customers about products they are specifically interested in:  Currently stores are laid out such that essentials are at the end. The hope there being that the customers will walk thru the aisles and pick up other (non essential) goods, which might not happen. The focus here is to have an associate show personalized recommendations to customers and talk to them about products they are most likely to buy.

For the business:

• Customers increase as they can save time.
• Now customers have an incentive to stay loyal!
• An option for customers to “like” certain “sales” is a viral way of marketing to others in the social network of those customers in the same geography.
• This is an additional option available to customers but is not mutually exclusive with the current system.

Some technical design considerations:

• Generating shopping lists involves significant data crunching and logic processing (algorithms). Hence it should be done over night at off peak times and the results should be stored, so they can just be rendered when needed with a quick response time.
• Use HTML5 code across all three channels (mobile web, iOS and Android) where possible will speed up iterations of the app and make it more maintainable. (there are some areas that still might have to be done natively like scrolling infinite lists).
• Using node.js on the server side is “bleeding edge” but it is proving to be  faster both from a time to market as well as resource consumption aspect.
• Recommendations should take into account seasonality,  and should be parameterized so marketing folks can tweak it based on metrics.
• Talking of metrics, all business related events should be instrumented so they can be logged, analyzed and reported. This would allow continuous tweaking of the recommendation strategies and measure impacts.
• Use facebook APIs, (social plug ins , facebook connect etc),  to provide viral marketing abilities so customers become the marketing arm of the business.

Other ideas include allowing friends to post and share recipes, with one click, where a friend can create and send the shopping list for that recipe to another. If the recipient is not a loyalty club member, they could be signed up with a single click as well.

The opportunities are immense and it is mind boggling to think about how grocery shopping will transform over the next decade, but that is a topic for another day!…