Who?
An established, major UK supermarket, with around 15% market share and a Moorhouse client for 5+ years.
The challenge
At the beginning of 2021 the supermarket conducted an organisational design exercise that resulted in the unification of their digital and physical customer experience design teams. The focus for the newly formed Customer Experience Design (CXD) team was to establish an impactful, powerful, end-to-end team that put customers at the heart of decision making.
To achieve this, the supermarket required:
- A ‘spine’ that ran from corporate strategy, through customer strategy and into day-to-day activity to connect the CXD team’s work with the organisation’s strategy
- A framework that includes foundational elements like vision, team principles, goals, metrics, design process, and ways of working to support the newly-formed team.
Early engagement with the client allowed us to help them navigate and further define the challenge. We then began to lead the development of the new Customer Experience Design strategy.
How we helped
A blended team of our strategy and experience design capability was deployed to work alongside the supermarket’s leadership and new CXD team. We ran a series of strategy workshops with senior leaders to clearly define the customer vision and map it to overall targets. As part of experience design, current and target capabilities were assessed and a design and innovation methodology was produced. As well as leveraging our own strong capabilities, sources such as Lego, Google and British Design Council were also reviewed to help inform best practice.
Together our dedicated team helped the supermarket find answers to the big questions that would allow them to mature their CXD team, including:
- Defining the value proposition, team goals, measures and the fundamentals of how they prioritise demand, allocate and deliver work
- Shaping of foundational operational artefacts such as a capability model to support the future development of the team
- Defining the capability for a newly formed end-to-end Design team
- Developing tools to standardise and ensure clarity around how the team designs which included a new Customer Journey Framework and a bespoke store Design Process
- A benchmarking report that mapped existing roles to market good practice and recommendations on how to further mature the team.
Outcomes
Grocery retail is a fast-moving, fiercely competitive business that demands customer needs to be understood in real-time, with customers placed at the heart of decision-making on everything from operations to new product or service launches. Through close alignment and engagement with the supermarket’s senior leadership and CXD teams, we helped to drive customer-centric innovation and experience and delivered the following specific outcomes:
- Maturity amongst the supermarket’s CX designers through the establishment of common processes and ways of working
- An articulation of their customer vision and value proposition to help drive better engagement with the business
- A store-wide understanding of the value of design, with the team’s input and engagement sought earlier in the process
- A unified CXD team that’s more effective, respected, strategically aligned and motivated
- Initiatives and innovations that are more compelling to customers – for example, an AI-enabled, checkout-free stores proposition.
We asked Moorhouse to help us bring purpose and clarity alongside rigour and consistency to a newly merged omni-channel CXD team, defining processes and ways of working in a clear and easy to follow playbook. They did exactly what we asked, but the way in which they embedded with and worked alongside the team made sure the work reflected the reality on the ground and built trust, accelerating the outcome we needed.”
C-Suite Employee, Major UK supermarket
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