2020 has been quite the year.
As a Digital team we are proud of the work we’ve done to support our communities, our customers and our colleagues – particularly those on the front line in our Food stores and in Funeralcare.
When the virus took hold back in March, we reprioritised where we could add the most value so we could keep colleagues safe and we could continue to serve communities.
We were in a position which meant we could respond to the pandemic with relative ease.
Our ways of working meant we were set up well – we were used to pivoting and changing direction; we were already collaborating with subject matter experts; and getting value into users’ hands quickly and iterating on feedback has always been what we’ve aimed for.
Over the years, we’ve also attracted a group of smart, determined and – most importantly – compassionate people who are intent on doing the right thing.
We are thankful to everyone who has helped transform Co-op so we could respond quickly, and well, to a pandemic. ❤️ 2020 has been awful but there is a lot to be grateful for too. ❤️
Head of Digital Products
Co-operate
We started Co-operate in April 2019 to help people come together and do good things in their community.
When the pandemic hit, people couldn’t physically come together. Groups started meeting online.
We had been trialing Co-operate in 9 communities before lockdown, and quickly had to cater to a national rather than a regional audience. We wrote about How we launched ‘Co-operate: get or offer support’ in 9 days.
As part of that work we:
- helped organisers move their activities online and made it easier for them to manage their listings
- helped people find things to do, see what help groups needed and share listings with others
- partnered with national programmes like the Duchess of Cambridge’s ‘Hold Still’ community exhibition
You can now use Co-operate to find ways to join, or help out:
- 3,425 groups
- 1,064 activities
And you can get advice to help you start your own community initiative.
We want to help people come together at a time when community matters more than ever.
“Great website… thank you for helping our communities.”
Community organiser
Joanne Schofield, lead content designer
Customer and Membership
The big focus for our teams this year has been evolving and relaunching Co-op’s Membership proposition to maximise its value to members, communities and Co-op.
New things:
- Members can now donate their personal rewards to other like-minded organisations. 70,000 members donated over £500,000 in total from their rewards to the Members Coronavirus Fund.
- Customers can now use Co-op’s digital services without becoming a member through ‘Co-op Account’ (they can upgrade to a Co-op Membership later).
- Members can now choose a local cause through the Co-op app or direct from their email without signing in – we saw a record breaking 619,000 people choose a cause in the first 8 weeks.
- Members can now scan a digital members ‘card’ on their smartphones in store – no need to remember the plastic card.
We improved and grew stuff too.
- The Co-op App surpassed the 1m download mark, with a rating of 4.4 stars across both app stores. We were number 2 in the app store on relaunch day, second only to NHS Track and Trace.
- 750,000 members choose 8.1 million offers in 2020, and 4.6 million of those have been used. This saved members over £2 million on their shopping and generated millions in incremental sales for the Food business.
- The systems and services that power our product stood up to 10 times our biggest ever day’s traffic, for weeks, thanks to the investment we made in moving to serverless technology.
We also connected up our digital experiences:
- Members can now sign in, shop and earn their rewards through Co-op’s ecommerce service.
- Groups can sign up to use Co-operate to publicise their activities within their communities.
- We implemented a new Membership design, which ties together how Membership looks and feels online with stores, on emails and in our marketing activity.
Joel Godfrey, Head of product
Legal services
This year we took some big steps towards making the law accessible — by creating experiences that allow people to proactively use the law for themselves.
Our team grew from a small group working on a conversational tool, to a multidisciplinary agile team working across digital services, website, email and search.
We started embedding design thinking, marketing and OKRs into our ways of working with multiple business areas.
And it’s started to have an impact:
- our work redesigning user journeys led to all-time high levels of probate enquiries in Q4
- our SEO work more than doubled organic traffic in some business areas
- one of our wills chatbots had 10,000 visits this year and increased average order value by £75 — because users are better informed about their needs
- we created a self-serve digital service that guides people through the probate process — we think it’s the first of its kind in the industry 🙌
Pete Kowalczyk, content designer
Digital service community
2020 has been the year that we reorganised and went from being the digital service ‘team’ – all sitting together in the Membership team – to digital service ‘community’ embedded across delivery teams. Being present and more visible at all stages of a product or service lifecycle has helped us put integrated processes in place and ensure continuous service delivery. This year we’ve helped our teams deliver 1,600 changes with 99.98% success rate – something we’re really proud of.
We’ve also improved our post-incident review process, increasing visibility across product teams to prevent reoccurring issues.
As part of our post-incident review process, we’ve started to share any outstanding actions with product teams which has helped prevent reoccurring problems – it’s all about working in the open! We’ve also created a ‘production readiness’ checklist which has allowed us to provide the best support for new services.
We’ve created and built support models to ensure a robust service too.
We’ve helped to:
- replatform Legal services
- replatform Funeralcare
- relaunch Membership
- launch Ecommerce
A big focus has been on embedding best practices and championing new ways of working – lockdown has felt like the perfect opportunity to do this. Everyone on the team has completed their ITIL 4 training which is making it easier to support our product teams to enable them to continue to do some awesome things!
Georgie Jacobs, service analyst
Accessibility
Our mission this year has been to look at how we design and build accessible products by default.
We delivered accessibility training to over 150 colleagues across many disciplines which has helped us raise awareness about what the term ‘accessibility’ encompasses. It is so much more than screen readers.
“It’s great to see so many people within the business mention accessibility across lots of different internal communication channels. It’s great work!”
Lucy Tallon, Head of Design
The training also gave us the opportunity to make accessibility more relatable. We ran 3 Accessibility Manchester events attracting over 1,000 people with all levels of experience, from both the public and private sector.
We also published our accessibility policy and encouraged customers, members, colleagues to hold us accountable.
“It’s nice to have a policy on a page on the internet but it must never become a virtuous-but-otherwise-empty promise. We know that if we don’t read it, keep it in mind and revisit it, it is just a vanity project.”
from Introducing our accessibility policy for Co-op products and services post
By October 2021, our product teams will have embedded our accessibility policy fully in their work and, by collaborating with external accessibility experts Fable, we’ll include up to 1,200 people with disabilities into our research, design and testing of products and services in the coming year.
Dave Cunningham, DesignOps Manager
Digital food customer experience
There are now 760 Co-op Food stores that accept online orders through our ecommerce site, shop.coop.co.uk This time last year, only 32 of our stores were taking part. The pandemic forced us to rethink and reprioritise how our how Co-op Food stores serve their communities. Back in lockdown 1.0 when people were stockpiling, we protected the availability of stock by introducing limits on the number of products each customer could buy on shop.coop.co.uk
We worked with the Identity team to make sure customers can log in to our service using the same details they use for other Co-op services. An architectural change allowed us to show a customer’s previous order for ease of reordering. Early results show greater engagement from customers interacting with previous orders, higher conversions and larger baskets.
With a growing team we needed to reorganise ourselves so we could become more efficient. In mid-October we held a team ‘evolution session’ and split into multi-disciplinary work streams to help us to deliver at pace.
To top it all off the Online Delivered Convenience programme won the E-commerce initiative of the Year at The Grocer Gold Awards 2020.
Stewart Livingstone, delivery manager
One Web team
This year we found that we had too many projects and we were struggling to get things done. To improve our focus, we reorganised our big team into 3 smaller teams
We’re still learning but so far, the change has helped us to work smarter, not harder.
We have continued to replatform Co-op websites, for example Legal Services to improve customer experience and reduce costs.
Making the platform more efficient and secure has been another priority. We have started to move our tenants onto Amazon EKS. This has led to a 30% reduction in deployment times and 95% reduction in failed deployments.
We have also delivered many features for Co-op websites. For example, we added ‘buy online’ buttons to the store finder pages. This allows customers to go from store finder to shop.coop.co.uk to order online.
Alex Hall, content designer
Funeralcare
Our digital expertise are spread across 2 teams: the Customer team which looks after the Funeralcare website, and the Colleague team which is responsible for the software used internally.
Like all other teams, the pandemic has meant we’ve had to pivot from our roadmap, respond quickly, and switch contextual user research to remote research. But, because of the nature of our business, we’ve been busier than ever.
Here’s some of what we did.
The Customer team
We:
- wrote guidance on how to arrange funerals during lockdown, updating them as the guidance changed
- re-designed the website alongside agencies and our digital marketing team
- created – and trained writers in – new tone of voice guidelines
- directed coffin photoshoots (thank you Gail)
- launched an online funeral planner so clients can plan a funeral in their own time and feel more prepared for a conversation with a funeral director
- designed and built (not yet released) a function to pay for a funeral online
- migrated to a new payment service provider in the process of enabling 3D secure for online payments
- designed and built (not yet released) a web chat function
- replatformed pre-need funeral plans and direct cremation sites from the episerver
The Colleague team
We:
- added a warning to collection notes if there was suspicion that the deceased has died of the virus and may be – keeping colleagues safe is a priority
- allowed families who had lost someone to register their interest in organising a memorial service once lockdown restrictions were lifted
- unrelated to the virus, we added a ‘quick notes’ function to allow colleagues to capture information around the context of the deceased’s state. It is added to the collection sheet to help colleagues mentally and physically prepare
Co-op Health
2020 changed the way people think about health services. With government advice to stay at home and ‘protect the NHS’, people needed more convenient access to repeat prescriptions.
We responded by opening up more ways to use the service. Now, customers can visit coop.co.uk/health and register on our app using a code from their GP.
To reach more people, we launched a TV advert, promoted the service in stores and our Chief Pharmacist, Neil Stewart, appeared on the radio to discuss worries about visiting the GP.
As a result, we’ve grown:
- into the 11th biggest UK pharmacy (based on the number of customers who choose us as their pharmacy) – we ranked at number 7,116 in 2019
- registrations, with 206 new customers every day on average – up from 30 earlier in 2020
- order volumes, with a record-breaking 1,610 orders on 30 November 2020
Our customers rate us ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot, saying things like, “You have made my life so much easier.”
Mary Sanigar, content designer
Co-op Food
The Operational Innovation Store (OIS) team has been working across 4 services that support store colleagues. Each empowers them to spend more time and energy on customers and members rather than on admin and paperwork.
Clock-in
Until this year, store colleagues clocked in and out when they started and finished a shift by punching their employee number into a legacy Kronos terminal (at a cost of £1,000 per store). Research told us it was easy to forget to do this and so colleagues would have to ask managers to amend their ‘hours worked’ in order to receive the right pay.
Alongside the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, we’ve made the process simpler, more transparent and more accurate which has helped make sure our colleagues receive the correct pay for the exact minutes they’ve worked. This has led to a 50% reduction in payroll amendments.
We started working on the Clock-in app idea in February and we’d rolled it out to every store by July. It can be accessed from till screens, hand-held terminal or tablet and has replaced the Kronos terminal.
We developed it as an extension of our Visit app and Clock-in times can be accessed from our Shifts app – which most of our colleagues use.
Raza Rizvi, product manager
Entry and exit
Colleagues safety is paramount and we did not want to ask them to stand at store entrances to make decisions on whether another customer could enter, or whether the store was at maximum capacity. To make sure social distancing rules are observed in our stores, we looked at how technology could help.
The Entry and exit solution was developed working with a number of different suppliers – through an iterative test and trial approach across a number of different test sites. The tests included the use of lights, sound and POS to understand what would be required to interrupt the customer journey and start a queue when the store reached its customer capacity.
You can read about how we chose a solution – it uses a camera sensor inside the entrance to keep track of how many people are inside and how many have left. It is connected to a traffic light system with voice messaging that advises customers that the store is full and to wait, or, to enter the store.
We launched the solution in the 250 busiest stores during the summer, and set it up in the 50 student-heavy / campus stores in the autumn.
James Beane, operations lead
Date code
Our work this year has been around making it more efficient for store colleagues to carry out date checks on both ambient (non-chilled) and fresh (chilled) products.
We worked closely with stakeholders from the Commercial; Risk, and the Retail loss and costs teams to develop an app that colleagues can access through a hand-held terminal. The app knows when a ‘section’ (small area of the store) will next be checked, and tells colleagues which dates they need to search for. Any items with that date or earlier will be scanned into the app, and colleagues will be prompted to reduce the price of them. Algorithms work out the best time to reduce items and improve the chance of selling them.
Previously, colleagues checked every fresh item, in every fresh section, every day.
The new process means colleagues no longer needed to record product checks and details manually or remember when to go back to reduce products and apply the correct reduction using a static reduction matrix.
Development started in March and we’d rolled out to every Co-op Food store by November.
We believe this product will save the business around £6m each year.
Lee Connolly, delivery manager
News and magazines
The News and mags app was developed in order to simplify a laborious paper-based system that our store colleagues used to manually log newspaper and magazine delivery, claims and returns. The aim is to significantly decrease financial loss caused by waste and leakage, by simplifying and bringing real time visibility into the process.
We kicked off development in September 2019. The app allows colleagues to scan papers and magazines, identify stocks in store fixtures of the same issue and retains information about previously delivered quantities in the app’s database.
Colleagues can now quickly swap old issues and top up existing stock. It also has an initial stock upload functionality that allows store colleagues to know what stock is currently in store and track what should be returned or if there has been any leakage of stock.
The last 2 months has been focused on the completion of dev and testing to move back into Alpha stores. We have rolled-out into 41 stores and performed stock uploads successfully, while simultaneously reviewing data, analytics and insight. Lockdown has forced us to research remotely but we’ve had remote access to hand-held terminals through Mobi, a smart app that allows us to observe colleagues complete their checks remotely.
Quantitative and qualitative research is ongoing and we’re working towards a full roll-out in August 2021.
Paul Anumudu, delivery manager
