Customer experience is quickly becoming the new competitive landscape on which brands are differentiating themselves. Increasingly, many technological innovations are helping organizations succeed on this front, and some omni-channel platforms are delivering the enhancements digital savvy customers are looking for.
This is a top concern for Lowes Foods, which recently partnered with Unata to dramatically improve its ecommerce customer experience.
“Lowes Foods has offered digital shopping and planning tools to their guests for many years,” Klaus Werner, Senior Director of ecommerce at Lowes Foods, told Loyalty360. “Offering our guests an omni-channel shopping experience is one of the most important priorities for our business today.”
Lowes Foods, a regional grocery retailer with locations across the Carolinas and Virginia, along with Unata, a specialized omni-commerce and personalization platform, has introduced a new standard of digital customer engagement into 60 stores.
This new integration is an effort to better address the habits and expectations of consumers who are changing the way they interact with brands.
“This initiative is fueled by a variety of factors ranging from technology capabilities and the innovations at our disposal, to guest expectations as they are now living in a world where social interaction, inspiration, research and much more is done from a mobile device, a tablet, or a desktop computer,” Werner continued.
The new company-wide integration is the result of successful pilot testing that demonstrated measurable improvements in customer shop fulfillment, in-store pickup, and home delivery.
“We have been incredibly pleased by the success of our pilot and the strength of our partnership with Unata,” said Michael Moore, Chief Marketing Officer at Lowes Foods. “Our collaboration has allowed us to improve upon the experience in real-time before moving ahead with full roll out. We have ambitious plans for providing a personalized experience for every Lowes Foods guest, no matter if they engage with us digitally or within one of our stores.”
These personalized experiences come via Unata’s proprietary suggestion technology.
Specifically, it will allow online Lowes shoppers to browse its entire selection of items. It will also feature customer recommendations and individualized sorting options based on search history, past purchases, pricing, and a variety of filters.
This new digital customer experience will also introduce the integration of “complex offers.” These offers usually provide extra discounts and bonuses after shoppers meet certain criteria. For example, customers that spend $50 or more might get an additional $10 off.
While common in stores, many retailers do not yet offer this feature online. But Unata will now make Lowes Foods one of the exceptions.
“We’ve had an amazing experience working with Lowes Foods through their pilot phase and are thrilled to roll out our platform across all stores,” said Diego Maniloff, Unata Vice President of Engineering & Data Science. “We know this experience so far has only made our product better for the customer and we’ve been able to do that with Lowes Foods based on a collaborative, trusting relationship that is entirely focused on what’s best for their guest.”