Anyone working in customer experience will know the famous quote from Walmart founder Sam Walton: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” It is a fantastic illustration of Walmart’s journey of growth and reinvention, always driven by the ever-evolving customer.
One of the key strengths of the company, however, is that with great scale comes great data. The retail giant collects about 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour, so it should be no surprise that technology, automation and data are the main fuel of its current reinvention in CX.
So what can we learn from Walmart's customer experience evolution?
Follow the data
Predicting and managing the supply chain in the most accurate and efficient of manners became an enormous asset to offer the best customer experience in the COVID-19 era. And so the retail giant has successfully invested a lot in creating an intelligent flow in a fully-integrated data system. An example are the “internet of things” sensors across over 2,200 trailers to give real-time information around the quality and freshness of its deliveries.
The beating heart of Walmart, of course, lies in its stores, and so it would never make the mistake of only measuring online traces: a physical store uncovers motivations and buying trends you wouldn’t necessarily uncover online. And so it spots and uses instore purchase patterns to create a customisable and enjoyable consumer experience, along with online data from its website, the Walmart Grocery app and member data of Walmart+.
Automate it
Walmart continuously tries to expand and update the automation of recurring services in order to be able to focus on the human side when it’s needed the most. It’s all about convenience, speed and helping customers save time: from a touchscreen tire-search kiosk and a Toy Explorer to the famous Walmart pickup towers.
The company is also currently accelerating its digitisation to create “smarter stores”, with shelf scanners to monitor product volumes, robotics and computer vision cameras to increase efficiency and contactless payment. At the same time, it’s piloting “hybrid locations” with “micro fulfilment centres” in the back to speed up pickup and delivery.
Walmart also invested in augmenting human intelligence with the Ask Sam voice-assistant app, which was designed to help associates better serve customers and do their jobs more effectively.
Be Hybrid
Retail lives both online and offline. There’s no way around it, and Walmart is one of the greatest at combining the best of both worlds.
Walmart Pickup Towers make sure that customers never have to wait in line if they have something delivered in-store, with Express Delivery in up to two hours soon to be available in nearly 2,000 stores. The hybrid Scan & Go app allows shoppers to scan items with their phone as they gather them into the shopping cart, then checkout with their phone’s digital wallet and walk out. Walmart even experimented with drone delivery.
And let’s not forget about the deal with Shopify. The latter allowed its merchants to list their wares on Walmart’s website and to expand its capacity to deliver more orders to more customers. The result was that Walmart’s third-party platform, Marketplace, doubled in size last year.
The paid subscription Walmart+ is also a perfect example of blending online and physical shopping experiences: it offers free delivery of online purchases as well as brick-and-mortar benefits such as fuel discounts and streamlined checkout processes.
Lifelong learning
More than any other retailer, Walmart understands the importance of lifelong learning for its employees to keep up with the ever-changing customers and market. It’s a huge task to train and retrain your 2.3 million associates around the world, of course.