Co-op Digital Blog

Membership is at the centre of everything at the Co-op and the Membership team works on ways to make it better.

I’m on the ‘Trading more’ Membership team and this week the first of 3 stores will get a Membership touchscreen for their shop floor. We’ve built 3 interactions.

1. Helping customers become members. The touchscreen gives high level information about Membership. Customers will be able to enter their email address and we’ll send them a link with details on how to join.

2. Encouraging temporary card holders to register and become members. The touchscreen lets temporary card holders see their rewards balance. They can’t spend their rewards until they register the temporary card so the screen asks them to enter their email address so we can send them a link with details on how to register.

3. Helping members add rewards after they’ve completed a transaction. The touchscreen asks members to type in a code from their receipts and adds rewards to members’ accounts for transactions when they didn’t swipe their card.

Why we’re doing this

The Co-op retail team is refurbishing 3 stores as we start to digitise them so we’re trialling touchscreens there. Firstly, we want to find out if customers and members will engage with us digitally, in stores.

We hope that the touchscreens will:

1. Improve conversion rates

We want to increase the number of people registering their temporary cards online. We’re hoping that the touchscreens will make membership more visible and help remind people of the benefits of being a member. By leaving an email address we’ll be able to nudge them to register their card and reinforce that message. We’ll track the conversion rate of customers leaving an email address and becoming members, or registering temporary cards.

2. Help users ‘do it themselves’

If members don’t swipe their card during a transaction, they can ask for a special receipt which allows them to add their rewards to their account later. They can do this themselves online (which accounts for 20% of visits to the site), or they can call the contact centre. These calls make up 8% of the membership-related queries. We hope the touchscreens will make things faster and simpler for members as well as reduce the number of calls our contact centre colleagues have to field.

Learning from user research before launch

We invited some people to come and test our screen in the Co-op Digital office. Seeing how people interacted with the screen was great and we made changes to improve the user experience based on what we saw.

When members and temporary card holders signed in, our original journey asked them to tap ‘Scan your card’ and they’d scan their membership card on the scanner. We found that the majority scanned straight from the home screen and were confused that it didn’t sign them in. We have now added in this functionality to make things smoother.

We also wanted to find out the type of data people would be willing to enter on the screens. We had a hypothesis that customers would not want to go through the full registration process on the screen because they’d need to enter personal details potentially in full view of other customers in store. Our user research told us we were right: almost all participants said they would have an issue entering anything other than an email address.  

What’s next

The screens are only a trial in 3 stores but if proven successful we could roll them out to other stores. We will use user research and monitoring to help us decide our next priorities.

We’ll post again and share how things go.

Liam Cross
Lead business analyst