What is Ocado doing to make it easier and more engaging to shop at Ocado.com? We’re finding an increasing number of shopping missions need to be supported in different ways. How we set up the shop front is important: how we create our aisles, how we spark interest with aisles like Future of Food, how we support promotional plans, how we make sure we’re aligned with Marks & Spencer for their marketing plans.
We’re also spending a lot of time thinking about the shopping experience. If you walk into a supermarket and pick up a bottle of Pimm’s, it tends to be at the far end. By the time you’ve got there, you’ve walked past the strawberries, the mint, the cucumber and the ice. Then you go: ‘I can’t be bothered to go back down there.’ Whereas we can say, ‘you bought Pimm’s, do you want strawberry, cucumber and mint?’ and drop that straight in the basket. So, our aisles are dynamic. As well as the way they’ve been set out, it’s about the shopping experience, the shopping mission.
Availability at Ocado is among the highest of any supermarket. How do you maintain that and does being an online pureplayer make that easier? What’s different for Ocado is that we take baskets for the future – it means that I’ve already sold product that’s still to come in. The challenge I have isn’t ‘is it available?’, it’s ‘can I still sell that because I haven’t sold it to somebody else already?’ I do feel my bar is higher and therefore I do find that more challenging, but that’s part of the fun and games of doing the job.
Ocado is widening the reach of its same-day delivery offering. Why? And how’s it going? We’re in the process of rolling out same-day orders in more geographies. We’ve seen it trialled in Bristol, it’s now going to Purfleet and a couple of other sites. The record we have is an hour and 20 minutes from an order being confirmed by a customer and us delivering it. With same-day you start to get into a slightly different customer shopping proposition. We’re seeing growth from existing customers. They are shopping more frequently. They are putting more in the basket. But there are some customers trying out getting the top-up order too.
Customers appreciate the professionalism of Ocado’s delivery drivers. How do you ensure that doorstep experience is always good? Our customer service team members are the only people who physically meet our customers. Even though there’s lots of technology, they are the most important part of our proposition. We spend a substantial amount of time making sure we get the right people in the door in the first place. Our retention is really important, how we spend time with them, how we make sure they become part of the family and understand our values, our principles
No comments yet