Enhancing Trader Joe’s customer’s experience through improved product discoverability and seamless checkout experiences.
Trader Joe's is one of the most popular grocery stores in the United States with a very loyal customer base. With affordable prices, a wide range of products and a unique service scape Trader Joe's has made its mark amongst a wide range of grocery stores. However, as with any service there seem to be a few challenges that significantly impact the customer's in-store shopping experience.
Two key pain points that negatively impact customer experience:
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Finding specific items in the store is quite an overwhelming experience for users and proves extremely time consuming.
02.
The extensively long checkout lines that extend to the aisles makes it harder for customers to navigate around the store and takes away from their in-store shopping experience.
Considering Trader Joe’s does not offer an online shopping experience, it is evident that the brand values in-store shopping and thus rectifying this issue is imperative.
In order to further analyse these pain points, me and my team (Brooke Shapiro and Sharon Toi) designed and facilitated a co-design workshop which further helped us identify scope for design intervention. The co design workshop focussed on solving these pain points and prompted participants to brainstorm opportunities and come up with practical design concepts.
Co-Design Workshop: Key Concept
A seamless in store product search and checkout experience facilitated through smart interactions
To enhance the customer's in-store shopping experience it was imperative to focus of 3 fundamental principles:
a) Discoverability of products
b) Effective Navigation
c) Time Efficiency
Thus the proposed concept focuses on expanding Trader Joe's existing digital infrastructure to accommodate features such as in-store mapping and navigation and leveraging technology to enhance their physical infrastructure : Shopping Carts & Baskets to facilitate efficiency.
Proposed enhanced touchpoints
01. Enhanced mobile site with a personalised customer profile and in-store digital map
Providing an option for users to create their customer profile on the website that can be accessed through a login portal irrespective of location and device. Currently the website allows users to create a shopping list in advance.. However, there is no way for users to access the same one in the store or identify if specific products are available in a particular store. Letting users create a profile and add products to a shopping list which can be accessed when in store will help reduce their cognitive load. Additionally based on the items added to the list the site should guide users to the closest store with the most items.
02. A smart cart/ basket for faster checkout experiences
The Trader Joes Smart Cart can efficiently detect the item placed in the cart by the user and links with the users customer profile to create a digital receipt of items for faster checkout. Once in the store, users can pick up a smart cart or smart basket to start shopping. The smart cart is equipped with RFID sensors and scanners that can scan items in the cart as they are added and create a digital receipt.
The Reimagined User Journey for Trader Joe's
Analysing the feasibility of the proposed concept
To identify any limitations in the design concept we conducted an enactment exercise where we conducted a role play of the above mentioned user journey. The exercise yielded some very interesting pointers.
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Start of the shopping experience: Considering the participant was a young adult, scanning the QR code on the basket and logging in to the desktop site was pretty intuitive for her. Additionally, since the participant has been to Trader Joe's stores in multiple locations she was pretty familiar with navigating around products.
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Looking for a specific item: On one occasion when the participant had to search for a specific item, she took sometime standing in the aisle, searching for the product in the mobile site before using the digital store map to navigate to the product.
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Checkout and Payment: Once the participant had completed adding items to their "smart basket" they reviewed the auto generated digital receipt and confirmed their purchase. Since the participant had no cards saved in their account they scanned their credit card to authorise payment and complete their shopping. Before leaving the store, the participant added the items from the cart to their bags and deposited the cart at the exit.
Enacting the proposed service design concept
Key Insights and Considerations
Business Considerations:
Making the change to incorporate RFID enabled smart carts might be a serious investment for Trader Joe's. Additionally since Trader Joe's relies specifically on its in-store experience and has always avoided too much of an online presence it was important to ensure that our proposed concept did not delve into the online shopping or in-store pick up scenarios.
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It is also important to consider that the mobile site will have to be constantly updated to the existing stock of products in a particular store which will need employee intervention or a technologically enhanced inventory & stocking system.
Customer Considerations:
Scanning the QR code and logging into the customer profile might not always be intuitive to customers especially the older generations. They might find the digital map and search function challenging to navigate. Plus it is good to note that some customers enjoy simply walking through aisles of a grocery store.
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The enactment also prompted me to think about people with accessibility requirements and certain cognitive limitations. It is important to consider their needs and modify the service to be more inclusive. One possible solution could be to have employees stationed at certain areas to provide assistance when required. Customers should also be able to request assistance through the website before their arrival.
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This particular user journey did not completely take into account users pain point of not knowing which store location has their preferred items in stock and in my opinion this is also something to think about. In terms of the proposed concept this particular user floow can be easily integrated into the mobile site where the customers can create a shopping list and the site's algorithm can propose the closest store with the maximum items requested.
Store Space & Staff Considerations:
Considering that people might still want to checkout the traditional way, the check out counters cannot be completely eliminated. A reduced number of check out counters must be provided to cater to customers in such situations.
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Additionally, the mobile site could have an employee log in to help them keep track of store inventory and cater to customer requests promptly and efficiently.
Next Steps
It would be ideal to beta test this idea for a limited number of days in one particular store to gague how customers react to the changes proposed and identify further challenges and pain points in the customer's journey.