EXCLUSIVE: How Albertsons created its omnichannel experience
Albertsons Companies seamlessly bridges its in-store and digital shopping environments with a customer-centric focus.
At the recent eTail Boston 2024 conference, I had the opportunity to conduct a fireside chat Q&A with Jatin Pahuja, group VP of app and webs, Albertsons Companies, to discuss how the grocery giant has been able to successfully bridge in-store and digital omnichannel experiences within a few short years.
Boise-based Albertsons operates more than 2,200 retail food and drug stores facilities across 34 states and the District of Columbia under more than 20 banners. Albertsons is in the midst of legal wranglings regarding a proposed $25 billion merger with fellow grocery giant The Kroger Co. Kroger recently filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenge to the merger proposal.
This article is taken directly from the conversation at eTail Boston 2024, with edits for length and clarity.
When you are building a best-in-class digital presence from scratch, where do you start?
Albertsons started with a simple framework consisting of four concentric circles. The first one is, of course, the customer. You always start with the customer. The second one is, where are you today in terms of your current capabilities as well as your current company standing?
The third circle is what are you passionate about, where you ultimately want to go and what do you want to achieve? And fourth, but not least important, circle is the need to create a sustainable business.
What were some of the specific themes Albertsons incorporated in your digital experience initiative?
First, we wanted to understand how technology is evolving, how customer needs might be changing, and about emerging cyberthreats. Once you have a good viewpoint of how the world is evolving, you can select the themes that you want to incorporate.
For example, as the customer comes to your app or site, it's really important to have a seamless and secure registration process. So we moved away from things like passwords in 2021.
Then, as you go further down in the customer journey, you need to think about how you can ensure an engaging discovery process for customers to find the right items. For that, we leverage data science and personalization to understand what customers are buying online and in the store so we can surface the right items for them at the appropriate times on their shopping journey.
Albertsons continues to see customers do most of their shopping in the stores. Omnichannel is a very important theme, helping in-store customers understand the value of our digital offering.
Another important theme is emerging around customers increasingly purchasing grocery items as ingredients of larger meal plans for their family, rather than as separate, individual products. We are building an experience which is more focused on planning meals and getting the necessary ingredients, rather than specifically about just buying one item at a time.
[READ MORE: Albertsons integrates with shoppable recipe platform]
Can you dive deeper into how Albertsons seamlessly bridges the digital and physical customer experience?
Up until two or three years ago, the store and digital customer journeys were very separate and isolated. Albertsons had to bridge that gap. We started with mapping these customer journeys on big whiteboards where we actually mapped each and every point of the customer journey in the store as well as online.
The key there was to find the specific touchpoints across the journey where digital can add value to the store experience and the store can add value to the store experience.
For example, when customers go into the store, many times are looking across aisles to find the right products and are trying to find the right deal with coupons. They’re trying to find more information about the products themselves.
In the digital journey, we found that if an online shopper had bought milk in-store two days ago, they don’t want us to show them milk deals online. Once you create those journeys and find the specific customer touchpoints, it becomes easier to intermingle the two experiences and create value one way or the other.
How can all customers, not just experienced omnichannel shoppers, obtain value from a seamless experience?
We can create omnichannel value by actually looking at what customers are asking for or how they're shopping in the store and bringing the experience online.
When a customer is in the store, they speak with associates to discover information such as is a particular product in season right now. You can deliver that same information online. And again, letting customers build their meal plans and ingredient lists online and then shop them in the store is something that we leverage to create seamless value for our customers.
