OVERVIEW
In 2020, Walmart CEO, Doug McMillon, launched an initiative across the company called “One Walmart.” One of the principle goals of the mission was “to unify and improve the holistic experience for our customers and associates.” The ultimate financial goal was to reduce the overall cost to serve while investing in new technology to boost Walmart’s stance amongst stiff competition and demonstrate innovation in the marketplace.
+70%
Walmart Associates quit their job in the first month, resulting in a loss of approximately $250,000 per employee
Walmart had been struggling to attract and retain their workforce. As part of the “One Walmart” program that focused on the in-store experience, I was hired to lead a team of cross functional experts to design and build a customer-grade experience for store associates, consolidate and deprecate wasteful technology, and realize a substantial investment and partnership with Samsung.
We created a detailed heuristic evaluation to understand all available tools and graded their performance
From our heuristics, we were able to gather more details and map out a comprehensive blueprint of the connected system
We spent time with associates to further define their roles and map out their respective journeys and jobs
We referenced adjacencies and competitors to benchmark our solution and define success metrics
One major area of opportunity that surfaced was the real need to “create a consumer grade experience.” Time and again we heard from associates that they felt like “second grade citizens with second rate tools.” Taking inspiration from the newly launched design system across the consumer experience, I challenged the team to reinvent the front end and create a system worthy of the importance of the associates to Walmart.
APPROACH
The main focus of this program was in service of consolidating over 100+ digital tools and integrating them into a single platform. Speed and cost savings was top of mind for the CIO and there was no focus on ensuring the experience was improved as a result. Coming in, I knew that we had to perform our due diligence and “get back to basics” through research and discovery tactics to ensure we weren’t carrying over any unwanted debt.
“Get rid of the zombies.”
One of the additional unlocks from research was the persistent negative feedback about the current treatment of the illustrations used in associate materials which was deemed “lifeless” which we wanted to fix
Created pervasive personalized messaging that are unique to the associate’s job, eliminating the feeling that they are “just another number”
THE SOLUTION
Heading into the design and testing phase, I led a cross functional group that co-created a vision for the experience: Design and build one associate tool that helps them simplify daily tasks, serve customers, and plan for life outside of work. We also created three principles that would serve to guide us in prioritizing our capabilities and keep us accountable to the outcomes for the users.
Walmart knows me personally.
Designed tools and technology that provide the associate with more actionable information and the ability to do their job exceptionally well
Walmart makes me successful.
Ensured that well being was always top of mind—leveraging moments throughout the journey to check in and capture feedback as part of the day-to-day
Expanding on the principles, we wanted to make sure we were addressing key pain points and JTBD for associates, prioritizing onboarding, “starting the day,” well being, time management, and communication.
As a result of refocusing our efforts on the upfront discovery and framing, we were able to make up ground and tap into our backlog of ideas as part of the initial release. The job function of the associate is so central to every aspect of the customer experience and one huge issue for Walmart was inventory accuracy—getting the items from trucks to the right shelves and Walmart was struggling with only being able to account for about 65% of its inventory. We took advantage of the hardware we had with Samsung and tested out a concept of making the inventory capture process more intuitive through sound design, utilizing our new framkework.
Walmart takes care of me.
To ensure associates are capturing every item, the team used intuitive sound design: The scanner emits a crackling sound that gets louder as it moves closer to the clothes that need to be logged. A series of video game-inspired beeps signals to associates when they’re partway through their task, and when they’ve completed it. The sound design is a perfect balance of productivity and play. The density of the sound–the crackling sound the scanner emits sounds kind of like a metal detector–is really satisfying to hear. As a result of this newly launched feature, inventory was logged in one third of the time it used to take and the accuracy of product getting on the right shelf was increased to 98%.
OUTCOMES
“We just did something pretty cool to assist Associates — and make them feel important, too. As retail continues to evolve — and quickly — it’s more critical than ever to equip our people with the tools and technology they need for success. Brian’s leadership was and will be so critical to our success as we continue to scale the Associate experience going forward. He pushed to the point where we ended up with something that was infinitely much better than where we started.”
– Drew Holler, Senior Vice President, People Operations at Walmart
+90%
Associate enrollment in the first week of launch
8 hrs
Making associates job-ready (down from 40 hrs)
+20%
Increased referrals to HR from existing associates