The Barossa Co-op is Australia’s largest and oldest retail co-operative comprising 12 retail businesses, 2 B2B businesses and a major regional shopping centre.
With ambitious growth plans to respond to the changing needs of the region, but hamstrung by ageing technology and a lack of integration between systems, the Co-op team had limited visibility of their customers’ purchases, preferences and changing expectations.
This significant knowledge gap made it difficult to make informed decisions about product lines, stock forecasting, marketing strategy and how to enhance the service experience.
The Escient team saw a great opportunity for a better end-to-end customer experience that would bring benefits across the entire business, create an enhanced value proposition, incentivise memberships, drive multi-channel engagement and assist in membership retention.
To define the ideal service experience and the technology that drives it, Escient needed to gain a deep and thorough understanding of the Co-op customer.
To obtain that knowledge we conducted a series of customer and staff interviews and workshops, combined with prior member surveys and regional demographic data, to help our client create a set of shopper personas (a set of fictional characters that represent the different types of Co-op shoppers).
The Escient team then looked around the world to gather best-practice research from other cooperatives and member organisations to inform the creation of a set of future-state journey maps based on typical customer journeys and identified the ideal experience for each scenario.
The journey maps were then used to create service blueprints to articulate the relationship between the ideal customer experience and the people, process and technology needed to support them.
All of this knowledge and understanding led to the creation of a Conceptual Enterprise Architecture to enable the Co-op to clearly understand the technologies needed to support their new digital future and immediately deliver better customer experiences, while confidently preparing for a long-term comprehensive upgrade.