"...a service which allows a customer to scan each product they take off the shelf using their smartphone, redeem vouchers and personal rewards, make payment with one button and walk out without queuing."
Besides being one of the country’s largest retailers, Pick n Pay is also one of its most innovative. At Seamless Africa, Pick n Pay IS Executives Jason Peisl and Sandra Moumtzis laid out the organisation’s customer-centric approach, and how this philosophy directs every one of their new developments. With the customer at the heart of their operation, they strive to create and maintain engagement, personalisation and immediacy.
"With 885 million customer transactions in 2017 alone on various platforms, providing engagement, personalisation and immediacy is an increasingly complex challenge."
When the IS team was looking for new innovations that make the Pick n Pay shopping experience easier and more rewarding they began to discuss introducing a shop-and-go service. Recently they tested ‘Hamba’, a service which allows a customer to scan each product they take off the shelf using their smartphone, redeem vouchers and personal rewards, make payment with one button and walk out without queuing. While still proof-of-concept, it’s a powerful demonstration of how new technology can enhance the customer experience.
“We cherry-picked building blocks that we already had in place, like our OLS, customer mobile app and our enterprise app,” said Peisl, explaining Hamba’s development. The function works through the Pick n Pay Smart Shopper app, for which Electrum already provides the switching technology.
With 885 million customer transactions in 2017 alone on various platforms, providing engagement, personalisation and immediacy is an increasingly complex challenge. “The ability to guarantee this true continuity and seamless experience for our customers comes from sophisticated real-time service-oriented architecture,” said Sandra Moumtzis. It’s a systems landscape held together in part by Electrum’s gateway product.
Among other functions, Electrum makes it possible for Pick n Pay to issue 4 personalised discounts every week to every one of their 7 million Smart Shopper customers. Electrum’s payments switching software gives customers a wider range of in-store and online payment option than ever before, including ordinary credit and debit cards, SnapScan, Zapper and Masterpass payments wallet. In addition, in what’s thought to be a world first for a grocery retailer, in 2017 Electrum enabled Pick n Pay to allow Bitcoin payments in-store.
Electrum SaaS also helps facilitate centrally controlled real-time promotions across multiple stores, even allowing the retailer to target specific outlets within a matter of minutes. Peisl described a hypothetical scenario in which a heat wave hits the town of Swellendam and the retailer is able to activate an hour-long promotion on Coke within minutes, isolated to that region or even a specific store. “No other retailer in the world can do this today,” said Peisl.
Clearly Pick n Pay is an organisation that’s unafraid to pioneer new technologies in the interests of enhanced customer experiences. Their digital point-of-sale offering boasts convenient Value Added Services and payment options, and one of the largest loyalty programmes in the country. Whether this digital journey brings groundbreaking shop-and-go services like Hamba to South African stores anytime soon is yet to be seen, but the fact that it’s been successfully piloted is a testament to their appetite for innovation. It’s also clearly a benefit that comes out of close working partnerships with technology leaders like Electrum.
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