Progressive Enterprises – “speeding up the weekly shopping to create a better online experience"

Progressive Enterprises Ltd knew that the proportion of online visitors who went on to become customers would increase if the shopping experience they had was quick, easy, and customer friendly; so they called for Olympic’s help with development and redesign.

Customer Overview

Progressive Enterprises Ltd owns the well-known Foodtown and Woolworths supermarket chains; and with a 45% share in New Zealand’s grocery market, is the country’s second largest supermarket player. Progressive is also the only New Zealand supermarket owner to successfully manage the unique challenges of online grocery shopping, and has been running a successful grocery website since 1998.

A major factor behind Progressive’s online success is their recognition that the more usable and user-friendly their site, the more visitors will make the decision to buy. This understanding has always underpinned their approach to website development: user feedback is genuinely sought, and then acted upon as quickly as possible when it is received.

Andrew Dixon, Progressive’s Divisional Manager – Online Business, explains his organisation’s focus. “Customer feedback is critical for our organisation.  We have feedback mechanisms on the site itself, and we make a point of contacting first time and lapsed users, as well as logging details of all calls to our Customer Service Centre. Unless we clearly understand what our customers’ issues really are, we can’t do anything to fix them.”

The Challenge

At its foundation, e-commerce success is primarily about two things: attracting potential customers to a website, and convincing them to buy once they arrive.  A good first-time experience with the site – where a user quickly and intuitively finds each item they are seeking – is critical if visitors are to become customers.

Unfortunately, grocery shopping is slow because it often involves large numbers of small items in each session. If a user needs to manually search for each item individually, their overall shopping experience can easily take hours – certainly longer than they are willing to spend.

Progressive’s websites already incorporated smart functionality that “learned” from users’ previous shopping choices, building up a history that ensured customers found what they were looking for more quickly and easily with every visit. Unfortunately, however, this didn’t help first-time customers: the very visitors it was most important to impress.

The Solution

Progressive realised the answer to this problem was surprisingly simple. Most first-time online customers already had a shopping history, created when they used their Onecards (Progressive’s loyalty card) in bricks-and-mortar supermarkets. If they could associate this real-world history with their online account, it would be far quicker and easier for first-time users to find familiar products.

Progressive asked long-term partner, Olympic, to custom engineer this association ability – along with several other enhancements. “Whilst our primary objective was making things easier for our first-time users,” remembers Dixon, “ we took the opportunity to improve several other aspects as well.  We worked with Olympic to completely change the websites’ look and feel, refreshing our online brand; as well as improve the search functionality, offer item-level substitution, and even enable our customers to reserve a particular delivery time before they order.”

Implementation

Standard software engineering methodology involves a sequence of gathering requirements, design, development, stabilisation and finally, implementation. “For a project on Progressive’s scale,” comments Olympic’s Solution Architect, Simon Chapman, “this would have taken far too much time, so we needed a more agile methodology”.

Chapman describes how Olympic broke down this model into a series of smaller chunks, enabling software engineers to test and stabilise small sections while other sections were still being created. Additionally, Progressive team members took part in unit testing, which not only meant Progressive stayed informed about project status at any given time, but also that Olympic could seek and incorporate their feedback into the design “on the fly”.

The Results

The website enhancements created a faster, more user-friendly shopping experience for Progressive’s first-time customers, leading to a wealth of positive customer feedback.  Additionally, Dixon reports, there has been a noticeable shift in the number of visitors taking the time to browse the site, rather than simply arriving at the homepage and heading off.

Perhaps the most significant result of the project, however, was the marked reduction in the number of calls the Customer Service Centre was taking from visitors needing help with problems or issues. “We noticed a considerable drop in complaint calls,” observes Dixon. “The site enhancements we made with Olympic have enabled Progressive to grow our business and respond to the ever-changing needs of our customers.”

Highlights

• Progressive Enterprises Ltd, the owners of the Foodtown and Woolworths supermarket chains, wanted to improve the shopping experience of their online customers.
• Because of the high item volume / low item value nature of grocery shopping, manually finding all the items in a regular shopping load could easily take a first-time customer hours.
• While the existing website could gradually ‘learn’ from online shoppers’ previous history, it couldn’t help the first-time customers whom it was most important to impress.
• Olympic worked with Progressive to enable the website to learn from real-life as well as online shopping history; along with making other usability, search and design enhancements.
• The enhancements prompted immense positive feedback, along with increased numbers of users choosing to browse the site, and a noticeable drop in complaint calls.