Creating a Seamless Customer Experience

Walmart is focusing on the store first to create a seamless experience for its shoppers, while technology plays a role in moving toward that goal. That will be the message from Jamie Sohosky, vice president of marketing, customer experience, when she takes the stage at the Path to Purchase Expo on Sept. 21 for a keynote presentation.“[Our customer has] already made the decision to shop at Walmart because she wants to save money, but we want to help her also save time,” Sohosky says, emphasizing that the customer experience team is really focused on delivering the latter.Walmart’s shopper is very digitally savvy, so the retailer is exploring how technology can save her time in every phase of the shopper journey, from helping her find things easier in the store to connecting her to the dot-com experience to get more product information, read ratings and reviews, or place an order.The efforts include big innovations such as Scan & Go, which has been tested in various iterations and will be reintroduced as a function of Walmart Pay – another new tech-fueled, timesaving offering from the retailer.“Also, our store pickup experience is going to get better and better – that’s one of the really critical points about how our customers are telling us they want digital and physical to work together, and we’ve made a lot of improvement there,” Sohosky says.And that’s just scratching the surface. “We are even looking at things that are a little bit old school,” she says. “Our stores are really hard to navigate, so we are making that easier through our signage and our associates helping our customer. We still think there’s a role for greeters, we still think there’s a role for helping our customer check out easier, whether that’s through something like Walmart Pay, Scan & Go, self-checkout or just finding a shorter line or opening more registers. We look at all of that.”Everything that touches the customer experience in the store is a focus. “Winning in-store is critical,” Sohosky says. “When [Doug McMillon, Walmart Stores president and CEO] talks about seamless customer experience, he talks first about getting the stores right, second about getting our online experience great, and then third about connecting those in a really seamless way for customers.”Walmart has been redesigning the overall store as well as individual departments – entertainment, baby, fresh, beauty, toys – all through the shopper lens. In the fresh department, for example, the retailer lets the product do a lot of the heavy lifting on navigation by highlighting quality and locally grown items. In the entertainment department, it’s about getting product out of the box so that shoppers can touch and feel it. In baby, the focus is on bringing the right products together to give mom everything she needs in one area of the store.The retailer additionally is looking at how it launches seasonal events, and Sohosky promises a fantastic plan for the upcoming holiday season. “We’ve gotten much smarter on the shopper at Walmart,” Sohosky says. “We have a lot more information on how she shops the store and how she shops online and looking at those seamless journeys and understanding how we win or lose with her.”

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