Technology retailer, Currys, has reached a major milestone on its digital transformation journey to becoming a leading omnichannel retailer that helps everyone enjoy amazing tech.
Today marks a significant moment in the Currys omnichannel journey, as it goes live with a more connected service across all of its channels that will provide personalised journeys and customer insights on a massive scale, accelerating its growth and delivering on its strategic objective to build even more customers for life.
This latest move has seen Currys create a new, single, integrated ecosystem, that gives its customers the best of its online and offline worlds; delivering streamlined, frictionless customer experiences, powered by a single, view of every customer. This will make it easier for customers to shop at Currys, providing them with an unrivalled range and delivering a better experience than they could get from a standalone channel.
Data reveals 80% of UK households have shopped with Currys and, on average, the retailer serves over 8.5 million customers a week. Sixty per cent of these customers prefer to shop across multiple channels and 27% more likely to shop again, compared to those who use just one channel. Evidence that not everyone wants to simply buy a TV or laptop online, they want to do their research, which often starts online, before they then decide to go kick the tyres on a product in-store.
Over the last 16 months Currys has embarked on a mission to transform into a best-in-class, digital-first omnichannel retailer. This has seen the retailer re-platform and upgrade its website, enhance its ShopLive service (UK retail’s largest video commerce channel), as well as deliver a new industry-leading ‘Colleague Hub’ in all our UK stores, creating the perfect blend of online and offline journeys to give customers the best of both.
Making sure that Currys colleagues can provide rounded support to its customers has never been so important. Last year Currys worked with The Future Laboratory* on a piece of research that looked at the role of store staff in the tech buying journey and it found that tech shoppers need guidance. When it asked about their buying habits over the previous 10 years when shopping unassisted – without the help of store staff – respondents admitted to buying an average of six tech items that didn’t do what they thought they did.
The research also found that almost half (47%) of consumers now prefer to speak to a real-life adviser in-store before buying a piece of tech. This goes up to 77% if it gets them to the right product more quickly. Currys own internal customer data further supports this, showing that customers who visit its stores are amongst its happiest and that expert face to face help is at the heart of why people shop with the retailer.
Currys’ newly launched Colleague Hub empowers its frontline colleagues to build stronger customer connections by giving them visibility of the customer from the moment they step into a store. This includes the online customer history, a log of all their interactions, and any items they’ve put in their online shopping cart, all displayed in real time. It also acts as a one-stop-shop for store colleagues with fast access to knowledge articles, and tasks so they can support each and every customer and can have more authentic and expertise-led interactions. No other retailer offers this kind of service at the scale Currys now does.
Says Currys CIO, Andy Gamble: “At Currys, our people are our magic ingredient and in a business such as ours it’s hard for the experience to exceed that of our colleagues. From today, our frontline people are armed with a richness of information not previously seen, as we put amazing tech in their hands and enable them to have more meaningful interactions with our customers.”
For a retail business of its size, the scale of the transformation delivered by Currys is unheard of. Over the last 16 months, its Omnichannel Connected Customer programme has tackled hundreds of legacy systems and hit over 600 milestones, while also navigating the pandemic. This has involved a team of over 500 colleagues, in five countries as well as external partners. It also re-platformed four sites without any drop in performance.
Andy Gamble continues: “At Currys, we exist to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. Central to that vision, is helping our customers discover and choose the tech they want and need, which is why we’re transforming to become a world class, digital-first, retailer. The hardest yards of our transformation are behind us as we launch a major step change in our omnichannel offer giving customers an unrivalled omnichannel experience, augmented by technology, and enabled by people. Today we have a radically easier and richer journey live both online and instore, so that our customers can seamlessly shop wherever and whenever they choose.”
Hitting this milestone also accelerates Currys’ ambition to become more data-driven, as it moves away from historically selling boxes to perfect strangers a couple of times a year and towards holding valuable millions customer relationships for life. With a significantly expanded customer base, Currys remains committed to getting to know its customers better and talking to them more in increasingly valuable ways – this way it can provide them with a higher level of customer service and even more help, ensuring that they keep coming back.
Gamble adds: “We have aligned thousands of customer journeys and are getting to know our customers better through data. Our new integrated and connected ecosystem brings together the online and in-store journeys in a way that allows us to have meaningful customer conversations. Looking ahead, we will give our customers fewer reasons to shop elsewhere as we talk to them more often, providing a deeper, more personalised level of customer service that will drive more frequent purchases and loyalty, and grow the uptake of our wider Services offer. To date, our omnichannel strategy has led to happier colleagues, happier customers, who are more likely to return, and a financially stronger business. Currys is now leading the way in omnichannel technology retail in the UK.”
*Source: The Future Laboratory – Conscious Commerce. currys-the-future-laboratory.pdf (currysplc.com)
