Engine Service DesignThe Service Design Consultancy
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Engine Service Design
When pricing came under pressure for Sainsbury’s and mobile technology-enabled wide-scale diversification of shopping habits, the super-grocer needed to shift the focus for customer experience design from tactical deployment to a strategic capability.
The Engine Service Design Team implemented multiple major projects alongside the Sainsbury’s CX Team, resulting in increased revenue, customer satisfaction and reduced costs. Today, customer experience design is well-deployed across all functions in Sainsbury’s, the digital team is fully-integrated, and Sainsbury’s now employs a team of service designers.
Client: 3 years Duration:
When Sainsbury’s pioneered the self-service supermarket in the UK in the 1950s, the shopper’s role changed forever. Over the last ten years, consumers’ expectations of shopping have changed dramatically, and Sainsbury’s have continued to lead the way to offer choice and exceed customer expectations.
Defining the future of grocery shopping
Supermarket shopping has become more complicated. As a trend, UK families no longer do one sizeable weekly shop and increasingly use supermarkets for food ‘on demand’ (although Covid-19 has pushed this trend back a little). Supermarkets sell much more than food, diversifying into non-foods, mobile phones and financial services. More and more shoppers are combining visits to physical stores with online click-and-collect and home delivery. The result? It’s now much more challenging than it used to be to segment shoppers. The Engine Service Design Team worked with data from extensive studies, customer feedback and qualitative research to define a new Customer Personas set. These became important in support of cross-functional working, enabling everybody to talk about customers in the same way.
Focusing senior leaders on the shift to services
Sainsbury’s saw these trends continuing and needed senior stakeholders to work together to imagine and anticipate how stores and technology should change in response. The Engine Service Design Team researched leading-edge retail and emerging retail technology. An important early step was to engage the Operating Board to define, on one page, a service proposition and principles for the supermarket. Engine’s “Future of Shopping” project in 2015 helped focus senior leaders on the strategic opportunity of designing new services and one customer experience.
Service design projects became a transformational programme
Engine started working with UK supermarket (Sainsbury’s) in 2014, to establish a cross-functional, collaborative role for service design. We helped make a case for using Engine’s Service Design System on five major projects within Sainsbury’s and evolved a comprehensive CX Design Toolkit. We delivered these projects as a customer experience programme emerged around them, triggering further work, facilitated by an expanded Customer Experience Team and using the tools we’d created.
The strategic programme was formalised with the objectives of improving customer satisfaction with Sainsbury’s overall customer transactions and consumers’ positive perception of Sainsbury’s, and work is ongoing.
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Identify the difference between what you do today and what your future customers don’t yet know they need. Reimagine the future.
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How design-led companies get more of the right services to market faster
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