Name: David Hills
Job title: Chief customer officer
How is the Joe Wicks tie-up being used online and how popular has it proved? We’re incredibly proud of our partnership with Joe Wicks, both through the Cashpot for Schools initiative, which has already raised more than £3.5m for schools across the UK, and through our School Night Dinner Winners – bringing time-poor families quick and healthy recipes that can affordably feed a family in less than 20 minutes. Our partnership features prominently across all our online channels, helping customers raise money for their chosen schools and access great value easy-to-cook school night recipes to enjoy together. The Dinner Winners are resonating with customers – so far over 450,000 customers have visited the webpage to find school-night meal inspiration from Asda enjoying our great quality products at amazingly low prices.
You have just released slots for Christmas. How popular are they and does that suggest people are geared up for an online festive period? The demand for our online Christmas slots is always strong – we have over a million available during Christmas week and are expecting this year to be even busier than last. The slots opened for delivery pass customers earlier this week and many have already taken advantage to book their favourite slot. Customers without a delivery pass can book their slots from 22 October.
How is the new Exceptional range being featured on the website, and how important a part of the offer is that going into Christmas? Premium-quality food and drink at affordable prices is the cornerstone of our Christmas offering both in store and online. We have doubled the size of our Exceptional range ahead of Christmas so that customers can indulge and enjoy the very best festive products without having to break the bank for them. Exceptional is being given pride of place on the Asda.com homepage with a full banner and links to shop the full range with a spotlight highlighting some of our hero lines. Within the Exceptional event page, we’re emphasising some of our key Christmas lines, and conversely on our Christmas events page we have a direct link to our Exceptional range, demonstrating that Christmas and Exceptional go hand-in-hand. This is already resonating with our customers as searches for Exceptional products on Asda.com are 60% up week-on-week and sales are up strongly too – our Exceptional steaks are just that, exceptional.
With Halloween and then Christmas coming up can you give us some examples of online activity in the pipeline? At Asda we believe we are the home of events for customers looking to celebrate key dates in the calendar. That’s why we have created dedicated landing pages and banners on Asda.com to showcase the categories and promotions around those events for our customers – both in store and online.This year for Halloween we’ve created the ‘Halloween Emporium,’ the one-stop shop for all our customers’ spooky favourites across grocery and non-ed, making it easier than ever for them to get everything they need in one place. We also know customers love our George Halloween costumes and associated products, so we clearly link to George.com on our grocery pages. We’ll be able to share more of our Christmas plans with you in due course.
In August research by private label consultancy IPLC showed key Just Essential lines were unavailable online, including baked beans, chopped tomatoes and eggs. What can you do to tackle that issue of value products being available online as well as in store? At Asda we are proud to offer the largest value range in the market, both online and in our stores. We launched Just Essentials in 2021 to ensure that customers could access the largest value range in the market at a time when budgets were being stretched. Since that time, we have continuously worked to ensure that these lines remain great value and are available for all customers who want to shop them. Earlier this year, we removed some Just Essentials lines as we found those items were better placed in stores where demand was greater.
In July Asda completed rollout of a new online shopping picking system for staff called Store Assist. It said the updated technology gives store pickers clearer screens, bigger product images and a single app for the picking process, “making this much simpler.” What impact has that system made? Any tools or systems we can give our colleagues to fulfil our customers’ needs is a welcome one. Store Assist has reduced the amount of time it takes for colleagues to walk the store and find the products that customers have ordered – making the entire process more efficient for our colleagues and customers. Store Assist processes an average of four million items daily across c75,000 orders with more than 26,000 colleagues trained on the system using 10,000 upgraded devices. This is one part of ‘Project Future’ – the £800m investment to replace more than 2,500 legacy Walmart systems with bespoke Asda platforms. Once complete, this will give us the best IT systems in the grocery sector.
Asda has recently injected £30m into stores as part of its reset plans, but what about investment into online? The £30m into stores is being used to help our colleagues serve our valued customers where and when they need them in stores, but also supporting our our online grocery operations. On top of this, as part of Project Future, which is an £800m investment by the business, a number of changes are taking place which will position Asda on market leading platforms to continue improving our online service – including the launch of our new groceries website later this year, which we’re excited for customers to experience.
How is the takeaway business going and how big a part of the online operation has this become? What operators are you working with and is there anything new? Our q-commerce operation continues to perform well and offers customers the convenience of rapid delivery, both via Asda Express delivery and our delivery partners. These orders make up a small percentage of our total online operation and we use four delivery partners for online grocery and express delivery: Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, and Gophr, enabling customers to shop at Asda in more ways than ever before.
How will the recently announced Decathlon partnership benefit the website? We want to offer our customers as many reasons to shop with us as possible, and by being able to provide products from quality brands such as Decathlon we hope that customers can fulfil even more of their missions with Asda whether that’s online or in store. By being able to offer quality brands on our websites, we hope to draw greater traffic, and this will mean more customers see the best of what Asda has to offer alongside our excellent brand partners.
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