Co-op Digital Blog

Our new membership begins today. Our members will earn 5% back on all own brand purchases and 1% for their community. 

From today we’re posting 250,000 cards daily to members.  Every member will receive theirs by mid October.

If you’ve been following our blog you’ll know that we started with a trial for 750 colleagues in our support centre, followed by a beta for our 68,000 colleagues and council members which began in July.

58,000 cards have been used over the summer, generating over 550 pieces of feedback which fed directly into improvements to the service. This membership activity by Co-op colleagues earned them £323,278 (the 5%) and £79,222 (the 1%) for their communities.

Ten things we’ve learned 

1. One of our biggest challenges was getting users to set up their new online account set up with username and password. The challenge is matching member’s data so they can identify their account. Colleagues found this hard so we’ve made the journey more intuitive.
2. We want to hold open and honest consent and be a trusted data handler of our members’ data. We’ve been testing the best way to explain this to give members confidence and have made some improvements to the journey.
3. We’ve added 4,050 local causes across over 1,400 communities in the UK. We’ve found that what matters most is different in each community and there are some great things our colleagues are doing already. We learned how best to allow members to select causes. There’s a lot more to do here though, including how we allow members to search for different causes – this is coming soon.
4. A lot can change in the 3 month period during which we manufactured our new membership cards. A member might leave the Co-op or have passed away in that time. We’ve done everything we could to be sensitive to our members’ circumstances, and to try do the right thing.
5. Through the beta we found that we’d configured the service alerting too heavily on certain aspects. We’ve now focused more more on the end-to-end service monitoring so we can clearly see the journey our members go on, and respond quickly when things aren’t as they should be.
6. We’ve made massive changes in our incident and release management process. Implementing ChatOps as well as making release management self service so our teams can act and make improvements autonomously and frequently.
7. Working closely with our colleagues in our contact centre has helped us to understand and respond to issues rapidly. 
8. We’ve made some significant improvements in the resilience and performance of the platform. This has significantly reduced our transaction time: for example registering a new member at colleague launch took 3.5 seconds, but it’s now down to 1.1 seconds for today’s launch. 
9. We’re removed our programme management layer that helped us to get to colleague launch and are now operating with teams led by product managers. We’re set up for our delivery teams to deliver iteratively and often. We’re continuing to develop our product roadmap for the months ahead, and have already set up a new delivery team for new services we’ll launch to our members in 2017.
10. Colleagues are very keen to start explaining the new rewards to our members.

The whole organisation has been involved, working like a true co-op, in making our new membership a reality, right from store to support centre to development teams to service management. 

Thank you to everyone.

Nathan Warner – Senior Programme Manager – Membership
Dave Johnson – Director of Engineering