SAM'S DIGITAL CARD
Sam's Club
Increase CX, Decrease Shrinkage
Sam’s Club is looking to improve its customer experience without increasing shrinkage. Scan n’ Go is a major pain point for shrinkage because members unintentionally skip items in the exit process.
Rapidly Innovate
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Review feasibility of previous Innovation Jam ideas
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Find pain points within the customer experience
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Create new innovations of previous submissions.
Recycle Ideas
We reverse-engineered past Innovation Jam ideas we believed could increase member experience and decrease shrinkage. Evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and member pain points of ideas taught us the feasibility of the innovation. I created the stakeholder presentation to showcase our new transformation of the innovation.
Improve CX
Sam’s Digital Card option is a new innovation to Sam’s Membership that would allow users of the same account to have their different profiles linked to a card that they can use in the store.
SAM'S DIGITAL CARD
Sam’s Club is looking to improve their customer experience without increasing shrinkage. Scan n’ Go is a major pain point for shrinkage because members unintentionally skip items in the exit process.
Understanding Members’ Perspective
Disorganized product categories make finding items harder. Prices were mistaken for feminine products instead of the spices below.
Identifying Pain Points:
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Disorganization of product categories
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Large, understaffed self-checkout lines
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Complex store layout
Our research began by shopping at Sam’s to get the perspective of the customer and paying attention to pain points along the way. As I was taking pictures and documenting our experience walking through Sam's Club store, one of the first things I noticed about Sam's was its complex store layout, with not many employees around to help guide you. The disorganization of the product categories between each shelf aided in the confusion of the shopping experience.
From a Customer's Perspective, the shopping experience within Sam's was very tedious because it required a lot of searching. Especially for customers who are shopping for their families and/or their businesses, it is a long treasure hunt to find all the different items they may need.
Inspecting Areas of Shrinkage
"The number one cause of shrinkage is theft by consumers" - Loss Prevention Media
Our stakeholder took us behind the scenes to inspect the member experience with the exit process. Most customers use the Scan n’ Go app, which allows them to scan a product and buy it right on the spot so that they can skip the checkout lines. If the employees find an item in the cart not scanned on their receipt, members wait an estimated time of 27 minutes to rescan.
"Produce [section] deals with the largest amount of shrinkage” - Sam’s Club employee.
Another large area of shrinkage is in the produce section due to the quality checks produce undergo before they are placed out onto the floor. The intention of quality checks is to increase buying potential.
Sam's club's aims were to improve customer experience. They believe improving the exit process would decrease the hassle for customers. However, by increasing positive customer experience through convenience, they are faced with increasing shrinkage.
-, Loss Prevention Media, et al. “What Causes Shrinkage in Retail? Addressing the 4 Top Causes.” Loss Prevention Media, 12 Mar. 2019, https://losspreventionmedia.com/what-causes-shrinkage-in-retail-addressing-the-4-top-causes/.
Comparing Options
Seeing the bigger picture
We examined Sam's Chef, a smart menu that gives personalized recipe recommendations based on customer preferences, shopping history, and items currently in the cart. I helped reverse-engineer to find the root problems we believed Sam’s Chef was addressing.
We initially ranked Sam’s Chef on how innovative we believed the idea was and compared it to Sam’s Club employee's rank. Our rank was lower than Sam’s Club’s rank.
To understand the employee’s perspective, I had to dive deeper into what problem(s) Sam's Chef was solving. For this process, we used the 6 Step Problem-Solving method and started from the evaluation stage backwards in a process called "reverse engineering".
Using the 4th step in the process, I evaluated that in Sam’s Chef, there was a disconnection between members not knowing what to buy, and the website and app not being engaged enough, causing customers to miss out on opportunities. The menu was a way to create a bit more personalization within Sam’s Club’s app.
Making Shopping Personal
"71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal" - Business2Consumer
I led the team in evaluating Sam's Personalized Shopping, a modification to the Sam's club app that allows customers using the same account to have products recommended to them based on their preferences, creating a more personalized experience.
"Our solution for this problem involves adding two simple clicks at the start of a session where we request the members to select a profile and give us a slight indication of the intent of their visit. With just these 2 data points we can build a completely personalized experience catering to the exact intent of the visit. " - SPS Creators
There are strengths and opportunities I identified that go into personalized shopping.
1) Data gathering.
2) Privacy between different users of the same account.
3) Eliminating "irrelevant” items.
Overall, we found that SPS is something that Sam’s Club could really use and would help set them apart from its competitors. We believe it would be beneficial to Sam's Club if they could create a positive customer experience through personalized recommendations based on their own individual preferences.
Personalizing Your Experience
Your card, for you.
My team transformed Sam’s personalized shopping to Sam’s Digital Card. With the creation of profiles, users under the same account could have their own individual cards to use at Sam's.
Disclaimer: Illustration by Ciara Castro
Our innovation also included other ideas such as an interactive map that tracks where someone may spend the most time and recommends areas close to them. With digitalized cards, Sam’s Club is able to keep track of individual members both online and in person.
Merging Opinions
Presenting our final idea.
We presented our ideas to our stakeholder, Jonathan. He believed our work was interesting and that we had taken a unique approach. He highlighted that Sam’s didn’t have much of a variety of products, nor a structured system of product placement for this idea to work.
Some steps to look into is what are other ways we could improve the shopping experience at Sam’s Club so that it is more personalized.