‘We’ve embraced the experimental approach’: inside Kmart’s plans for in-store experience

This is becoming increasingly crucial as more consumers are saying they are likely or highly likely to buy through social media in the future. In Australia, 71% of respondents say they are likely to buy on social media, according to a recent survey by Essence.

The same survey also found more than 50% participated in live shopping and conversational commerce, with 80% of those people enjoying the shopping experience.

This has seen retailers such as Kmart utilize data and technology, the Australian chain store working with martech outfit Optimizely to support its lowest price position by improving the customer offer while further reducing its operating costs.

“We are investing in a multi-year program to transform the in-store customer experience and deliver operational efficiencies to improve our e-commerce offerings and build a robust omnichannel,” explains John Paul Ungar, digital customer experience manager at Kmart Australia.

“Working with Optimizely for over five years, we have embraced the experimentation approach across our business, helping to address new challenges and keep up with changing customer expectations.”

Australians are also basing real-life decisions on what they see online, such as who they date, where they eat and what they buy. They will not book a restaurant or a hotel, buy a product or apply for a job without checking the business out online first.

A study by Squarespace and YouGov found Australians visit more than 3,200 websites in a year on average and are more likely to remember the last website they visited than their tax file number.

This means it has never been more important for brands and individuals to consider how they present themselves online.

Ungar points out even before the pandemic significantly changed consumers’ behavior, to remain competitive Kmart focused on being a customer-led and digitally-enabled retailer. It does this by focusing on a data-driven approach to test and react to the market effectively and efficiently.

“New omnichannel models such as click & collect have also become increasingly popular. We use data and technology to recognize rising demand and incorporate better flexibility into our customer offering,” he explains.

“We recently built augmented reality (AR) into our website, providing customers with an in-store experience digitally. This technology has helped customers have more confidence in our products when purchasing online, as seen when trialing the feature in an Optimizely experiment before fully committing.”

He adds: “We are training and growing our teams to further incorporate experimentation and personalization using Optimizely in more parts of our online process.”

The same focus on experimentation online is also translated offline, says Ungar, as experimentation helps Kmart better understand which ideas might serve its customers better and which ideas do not add value.

This is particularly important with omnichannel solutions such as click & collect where Kmart combines customer feedback and operational and uptake data to decide which ideas are rolled out to its store network that has grown during the pandemic.

Kmart’s store network is an important part of its omnichannel future to serve its customers, which it believes it does better than online-only competitors.

“Providing a tailored experience for our customers is important during the pandemic, as we have thousands of products, and we want to make sure that they find the products they’re looking for, at the time most needed, with ease,” explains Ungar.

“We use Optimizely’s personalization functionalities to provide tailored experiences to specific user groups, for example personalization based on geo-location being used to show customers in lockdown areas a homepage that is relevant to their needs, and a different homepage to those who are not in lockdown and have very different needs.”

He continues: “We strive to better connect customers to the brand by offering a bespoke relevant experience across all channels.”

As customer behavior will change and evolve in these uncertain times, leveraging experimentation has also enabled Ungar’s team to determine Kmart’s customers’ needs and helped the retailer stand apart from the competition.

“We want to highlight the customers’ preferences to have an efficient and smooth experience every time they visit us and inspire them to return either in-store or online. Experimentation helps us invest in the areas that really make a difference to our customers,” he explains.