waitrose customer service case study

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Getting personal: Waitrose partners with Ecrebo for direct and personalized in-store communications

In 2015, Waitrose turned to Ecrebo to improve the way it engaged with in-store customers, which ultimately opened up a powerful and dynamic marketing channel.

A Fresh Approach to In-Store Customer Engagement

As one of the UK’s leading grocery retailers, Waitrose is recognized for their commitment to championing high-quality British produce. Part of the John Lewis Partnership, the retailer operates more than 350 stores across the UK. Waitrose recognized that there was a significant opportunity to communicate with loyal customers shopping in their stores. Their goal was to find a more personalized approach to in-store communications that would set them apart from their competitors, but that would also fit with the Waitrose ethos. Ecrebo’s POS-based marketing platform proved to be the solution that Waitrose was looking for.

Waitrose Teams with Ecrebo to Provide Targeted Customer Engagement

Waitrose worked with the team at Ecrebo to deliver a solution that would enable their Partners to hand a printed coupon to customers in-store, which included real-time offers and personalized promotions and messages that were relevant to them. Known as ‘Message at Till’, the offers contain simple messages, printed at the till using their existing receipt printer, directly after the customer’s receipt. Through this partnership, Waitrose would now be able to give their customers more of what they loved in a more direct and personal way. The initial trial to evaluate Ecrebo’s technology launched in 2015 across ten stores over a two-month period. Waitrose was confident the trial would work from a functional perspective, however, the real test would be in measuring customer engagement, response rates, and return on investment to help create a solid business case. In a matter of weeks, the ‘Message at Till’ solution delivered compelling results. As a result of the success of the initial trial, the Ecrebo Coupon solution was rolled out across the full Waitrose store estate in a matter of months.

“From an IT perspective, deployment of the solution was just as seamless as Ecrebo said it would be,” said Sam Winterson, Manager, Customer Loyalty, Waitrose. “Anything that impacts a retailer’s tills can often be seen as a barrier because they’re so important to sales, but Ecrebo carried out a comprehensive testing process prior to fully deploying, which gave us faith in the new system. Rolling out Ecrebo’s technology is now on record as one of the smoothest IT implementations we have executed to date.”

A Winning Combination: Ecrebo Gives a Boost to myWaitrose Loyalty Scheme

Ecrebo’s technology enables Waitrose to communicate with its in-store customers at the point of sale and in real-time through highly [1] targeted coupons and messages. Personalized promotions, offers, and messages are printed alongside paper receipts and handed directly to customers by Waitrose Partners.

The Ecrebo POS marketing platform is now fully integrated with the myWaitrose loyalty scheme, which has over six million members and years’ worth of data, enabling Waitrose to better understand their customers. Using this insight, Waitrose can set up basket triggers and targeted loyalty offers to reward myWaitrose customers with relevant offers and messages based on previous purchases or items in their shopping basket. This allows Waitrose to provide customers with money [1] off rewards, recipe suggestions, free products and offers introducing them to new and relevant product areas - all with the right message at the right time.

Ecrebo’s Coupon solution has given Waitrose a dynamic marketing channel that can be switched on and off at the touch of a button, giving them a quick and easy way to set up and launch in-store campaigns. Due to the nature of Ecrebo’s SaaS software, the Waitrose team can now manage campaigns anywhere, anytime. It is a marketing channel that is always on. What’s more, it is a marketing channel that delivers a higher ROI for Waitrose than direct mail or email because of its ability to target customers efficiently and in real-time.

From the outset, Waitrose was clear that offers should always have a high perceived value and add value to their customers’ shopping experience. When setting up campaigns, the Waitrose team take their customers’ shopping habits, spend levels, and shopping frequency into account, to ensure they are rewarded accordingly.

Complementing Other Marketing Activity

Waitrose view ‘Message at Till’ as a marketing channel that complements both online and offline channels, and is fully integrated with their other marketing campaigns.

“With ‘Message at Till’, it is all about speed. We have been able to implement campaigns within minutes, check that they are running, and see how many coupons have been issued in real-time. It’s also possible to control the location and timing of offers.

No other CRM activity can do that,” said Carl Kirby, CRM Marketing Manager, Waitrose. “Direct mail and email can drive people into the store, but ‘Message at Till’ can engage customers whilst they’re in the store and encourage them to come back. The solution can be very powerful when used alongside other marketing channels and gives customers a specific reason to come back to our stores.”

We have been able to implement campaigns within minutes ... no other CRM activity can do that  Carl Kirby CRM Marketing Manager, Waitrose

Looking Towards the Future: Waitrose Signs Five-Year Deal with Ecrebo

Waitrose sees Ecrebo’s Coupon technology as an opportunity to truly connect the dots between shoppers’ trips. It offers calculable, incremental value for the customer, which drives loyalty and increases visit frequency. In a short amount of time, “Message at Till” has made it easy for the Waitrose team to track results and show how campaigns are performing against where they expected them to be.

Carl continued, “Since the initial trial, Ecrebo’s platform has opened up a dynamic new marketing channel for in-store customer engagement that is incredibly agile, efficient, low cost, and low maintenance. Most importantly, for our customers, it enables us to provide more of what they love in a really direct and personal way.”

“Ecrebo’s platform has opened up a dynamic new marketing channel for in-store customer engagement that is incredibly agile, efficient, low cost and low maintenance Carl Kirby CRM Marketing Manager, Waitrose

“We’ve proved that the Ecrebo solution helps us achieve our strategic goals, so it was a natural progression for us to move to a long-term strategic partnership. The way in which they invest for the future and their future direction completely aligns with Waitrose and where we want to go as a business.”

Get the most out of your receipts with Ecrebo

Ecrebo's patented, software-only solution makes it easy for retailers to cost-effectively deliver personalized offers and messages at checkout on paper and digital receipts.

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Because everyone is carrying the RingCentral app with them on their main device, it’s much easier for our team to communicate with each other, even while they’re doing other tasks.

Matt Doughty

In today’s competitive retail environment, you can’t maintain a highly successful chain of stores without outstanding service. with that in mind, you can guess waitrose & partners’ top priority., shopping for a more agile phone system.

Using a cloud service means we don’t have to own and maintain phone hardware assets anymore.

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Waitrose noticed that their highly valuable customer base was slowly eroding over time.  There had been no dramatic change to Waitrose’s approach that was pushing them to go, merely that the supermarket had failed to show them how much they loved and appreciated them. Analysis of the key measures showed that these loyal customers were feeling less rewarded and their Net Promoter Score (NPS) had fallen by 14 points meaning they were more likely to shop elsewhere. Waitrose set out to recognise and reward this highly profitable segment of best customers to prevent churn, increase spend and frequency, and improve NPS.

Waitrose’s Just for You Best Customer programme is a highly targeted, highly personalised mailing programme aimed at engaging and rewarding Waitrose’s most valuable and valued customers. Mailings are sent 5-6 times a year to 600k-800k to loyal customers on the Waitrose database Every element of the pack is personalized, making each pack unique to the recipient. Using programmatic technology Waitrose are able to target specific imagery based on shopper history. Inside, highly personalised category coupons, driven by the customers’ purchasing behaviour, incentivise purchase and trial.

The effectiveness of the campaign was measured on both short term and long-term measures. Short term looked at how each individual campaign performed and how many customers used their vouchers. The long-term measures were customer retention and loyalty. Each campaign was benchmarked against a campaign control cell – 10% of customers who did not receive the mailing.  There was also a control cell across the year.  This allowed Waitrose to compare results on a both on a campaign and a yearly level. 

Voucher redemption was over 50% and their NPS increased +55 points.

"The Just For You campaign has clearly been paramount to improving our NPS score but I think there have been added benefits that we didn’t necessarily realise when we started the campaign. Fundamentally, it has confirmed the importance of our best customers and as a business we are now focussing on a marketing strategy purely for our ‘best’. It has also pushed us to explore the levels of personalisation we can achieve within direct mail and the positive feedback we receive from customers confirms it’s working. Now, during the Covid-19 pandemic it is more important than ever that we thank our best customers for their continued loyalty and with so many emails from various brands regarding their approach to coronavirus, direct mail felt like a more personal and effective way to communicate. Throughout the pandemic we have sent two Just For You campaigns and the first best customer Christmas card.”

Charley Howell, Assistant Marketing Manager, Waitrose

Did you know a whopping 99% of Customer Mail is engaged with, 71% say they trust it and 43% leads to a commercial action such as going online or making a purchase? New ground-breaking research written with Accenture gives an in-depth review of CX and multi-channel communications, including Customer Mail.  Download the full report here.  

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