beta – Co-op Digital Blog

Introducing Co-op groceries on demand

August 22, 2019August 22, 2019Co-op3 Comments

This week we launched the digital front-end of Co-op Food’s home delivery and collection service. Customers within the M4 postcode can now order from the Corporation Street Co-op in Manchester city centre, and our proof of concept website continues to be available from 10 stores across central London.

The service is in beta at the moment which means we’ll be watching and analysing how customers are using it with a view to rolling it out to wider postcode catchments and to other Co-op Food stores. You can see the service at quickshop.coop.co.uk

How it works

Customers order through the website. Colleagues at the local store receive a notification on the store’s tablet and gather the items in the order from the shop floor. The customer then either collects their order or one of our delivery partners picks it up and couriers it.

At the moment, there’s a minimum spend of £15 (research suggests the average spend will be around £25) and customers can choose a 1 hour delivery slot. They can also choose to receive their order as quickly as 2 hours after they ordered. Delivery is currently free.

Keeping up with competitors

Co-op Digital began researching how people shop for food last summer – much of it was qualitative and took the form of interviews and Whatsapp food diaries, but some was quantitative. For example, online behaviour on coop.co.uk and a significant number of searches on the site suggested that customers expected us not only to have a website that allows them to browse the products we stock, but a transactional service they can buy them through.

Until now, Co-op didn’t have the latter and we need to keep up with competitors.

The Co-op difference

But just as Co-op Food stores revolve around convenience rather than the weekly ‘big shop’, so does our delivery service.

Interviews and food diary studies from our research helped us understand that we have to remove the guilt associated with convenience shopping. For this reason our vision for groceries on demand is:

Our research also showed us that Co-op is well placed to:

support bigger shops with fresh food ‘top-ups’
help those wanting to cut out a visit to a store in between finishing work, picking kids up and taking them to various after-school clubs
serve foodies who have their minds set on cooking a specific dish or menu rather than deciding what to cook after browsing the aisles for inspiration or offers

On your marks, get set… shop

It’s been our team’s aspiration to design a service that allows customers to browse or search, find, choose, and buy products as quickly as possible. We’d decided that part of how we’d know whether we’d been successful would be to compare the time it took people to shop using our service with how long it took them to buy the same items through a competitor’s.

We’re expecting around 75% of transactions to be carried out on phones so we asked research participants to use their device. It typically took the small group we tested with half the time to complete the shop using the feature we’re developing as it did competitor services.

What’s (probably) next

Based on continuous research, we’re expecting our service to be welcomed by customers – it’s what they expect from a supermarket after all. We’re looking at the analytics and we’re asking for feedback to help us improve the service continuously.

What we prioritise and work on next depends heavily on what we learn from the feedback but there are certain things we expect to add to the site at some point. These include:

ways to improve the experience for returning customers
creating a personalised shopping experience
expanding our beta service to more stores and replacing the proof of concept website

If you try the service, let us know what you think.

David Gregory, Delivery manager
James Rice, Lead designer

We’re live! Funeralcare colleagues have started to use the digital service in Edinburgh

August 30, 2017August 30, 2017Co-op1 Comment

We reached a milestone last month when our colleagues in Edinburgh started arranging real funerals with the digital service we’d designed together. Although they’re keeping some of the existing, more paper-based ways of doing things as a safety blanket until they get used to things, our Edinburgh branches are the first to use our new ‘at need’ digital funeral arrangement service.

We’ve been testing the service with colleagues in Bolton and Edinburgh. For this post, we’ve spoken to Jamie Rafferty, a Funeral Director in Edinburgh, to find out how colleagues feel about what we’ve built so far. We recognise that Jamie is just one user and that what he’s sharing here is what he’s found to be the general opinion of the digital service so far.

Of course, we’re still listening to colleagues about what we need to improve before we roll things out to other branches and we’ll continue to do that.

Saving time and keeping details central and safe

When Funeralcare colleagues receive a call telling them that someone’s died, they record details of the deceased. The digital service is helping them move away from paper forms and instead asks them to add the details into a digital form. This change means the information is held safely and is available immediately so other Funeralcare colleagues can access it when they need to.

Jamie’s found that colleagues like only having to capture information once. He says, “It’ll help save time. At the moment there’s lots of duplication as we have to keep repeating information such as name, address etc in several paper forms.”

Giving everyone instant visibility

It’s incredibly important that colleagues know who they have in their care and where they are. The deceased can now be booked in and out through the digital service. It also requests that 2 people verify unique ID numbers when colleagues move them to a different location.

Edinburgh colleagues say they’re getting used to doing these things digitally rather than relying on paper records. “Previously, we’d have had to make lots of phone calls to consolidate the paper mortuary registers in all the branches,” says Jamie. Now, the transparency is making it easier to keep track of who’s where, when.

Knowing what’s been done

Colleagues get involved at different stages of planning and performing a funeral so communicating progress is essential. We’ve developed a new care and preparation section to show which tasks have been completed, which ones are in progress and which ones are still left to do.

Not only does this help manage the workflow, Jamie’s colleagues who speak directly to clients say it’s helping them arrange viewing appointments for family members. Now, if a client wants to come in and see their loved one, they can make an appointment straight away because colleagues don’t have to make several calls to find out about the progress.

Personalising the funeral

There’s no such thing as a typical funeral and our all colleagues want to do everything they can to help families give their loved one a personal send-off.

To help, we’ve built ‘about me’ text boxes so colleagues can make notes as they learn more about the deceased. For example, if someone was a big football fan, colleagues can make a note and might then suggest choosing flowers in their team’s colours or plan a route that goes past a certain stadium.

The boxes for extra details have been welcome additions. “It’s all about making the funeral special and making sure the wishes of the family are followed,” says Jamie.

Visibility of availability

The digital service gives colleagues access to a shared calendar which can be seen by all Funeralcare colleagues within a region. It has filters so they can see when funeral directors within their care centre are available. This means they can provide a quicker service by provisionally booking in a funeral while a client is sitting with them. “Before the digital service, colleagues had to leave the client on their own, or ring them back, because we’d have to phone a resource department in order to find out about availability,” says James.

Where next for the Funeralcare digital service?

We’ll be coming out of beta soon and we expect to be live in 4 regions before Christmas. Then we plan to roll out the digital service across the rest of the country during 2018. We’ll also be doing more work to make things more comprehensive. As well as doing more to help colleagues we have plans to build some client-facing services. So while the service gets more users, it also keeps getting better through continuous delivery.

Funeralcare team

Funeralcare: taking the beta to Edinburgh

February 27, 2017March 21, 2017Co-op3 Comments

Since April 2016, the Funeralcare team at Co-op Digital has been working to make life easier for our colleagues at our funeral homes across the UK. Our aim has always been to reduce the time our colleagues spend juggling and filling in paper forms so that they can spend more time with their clients – people who are grieving for their loved ones.

It’s been awhile since we wrote an update on our work. Back in August Andy Pipes, our Head of Product Management, said that we were rethinking how we deliver our at-need funeral service (an ‘at-need’ service is the immediate assistance someone might needs after reporting a bereavement).

At that point we’d built:

a ‘first call’ service that logs details of a death and automatically alerts an ambulance team by SMS to take the deceased into our care
a funeral arrangement service which captures the client’s decisions, the costs, and keeps colleagues in various locations from funeral homes and the central care centre updated
a hearse booking system, staff diary and staff assignment service
a coffin stock control system, and a way for clients to browse the existing coffin range
an audit system that captures certain steps in the service

Since then we’ve been busy testing with colleagues and iterating.

We’ve added new features

As we’ve learnt where the gaps are in the service, we’ve added new features. They include a digital mortuary register and a digital belongings log to record possessions.

Deceased can come into our colleagues’ care at any time of the day or night and it’s vital the funeral director knows where that person has been taken. To help, we’ve developed a digital mortuary register so that ambulance staff can book the deceased in and the funeral director can see where the person has been taken.

Another new feature is a digital belongings log. Often, when someone is brought into our care they’ll have jewellery on them or other personal belongings with them. This means that when a funeral director at a funeral home gets a call from the grieving family to check up on jewellery, they don’t immediately know what the deceased came in with because the paper record is with the deceased at the mortuary. To make this easier and more efficient, we introduced a digital log instead of needing multiple phone calls between different locations.

Live trial and user testing

We’ve been testing in 2 ways. From September to November we continued to visit funeral homes all over the country to observe how colleagues work but we were also doing usability testing on each of the individual features in the bulleted list above with colleagues in mock labs. We tested and improved each feature separately until we thought we’d built enough of a service to be valuable to colleagues. At that point, in December, we rolled out a beta trial in Bolton.

We asked colleagues in Bolton to use the service in parallel with their current process which involves whiteboards, post-its, paper diaries, fax machines and the old, often painful-to-use software. Letting them use it for real is the best way to learn what’s working and what’s not. It drew our attention to 3 major things we’d overlooked during usability testing.

We thought we were being helpful by preloading the local churches and crematoriums but we hadn’t given colleagues the option to create new ones.
We found that the calendar couldn’t cope with all day events.
We discovered that colleagues help each other out so having restricted access for specific roles creates a problem if someone is off ill and cover is needed.

Testing the beta with a small number of colleagues helped us catch problems like these before we rolled the service out to more people.

Trialling the service in Edinburgh

We want our service to be useful everywhere but we’ve been told many times by colleagues that there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ funeral. They vary from region to region for reasons including local traditions, operational set up, affluence, traffic as well as legislation. Because our aim is to give time back to colleagues so they can spend it with their customers, we need to create something that works for all users not just our colleagues in Bolton. That’s why we are launching our at-need funeral service trial in Edinburgh in March.

We’re still learning

The beta has shown us that funeral arrangements are made up of multiple interactions like choosing flowers, booking venues and signing off obituary notices. Funeral arrangements are iterative with lots of tweaks along the way, so iterating the design is the only way we can cope with all the new things we keep learning.

We know that standard software packages don’t solve every problem. By involving colleagues throughout we’re building something that meets their needs and will improve things for both colleagues and their customers.

We’re transforming the Co-op Funeralcare business but we believe that what we’re doing here will actually help transform the entire industry. To help us do this, Co-op Digital is working towards having a dedicated digital product teams within the Co-op Funeralcare business.

If that sounds like something you’d like to help with we’re looking for an agile delivery manager and a product manager.

Come to a talk about the digital transformation of our Funeralcare business on 28 March. We’re particularly interested in speaking to product managers, delivery managers, software developers and platform engineers. You can get your free ticket at Eventbrite.

Carl Burton
Product lead