Customerland

Empowering Retail Performance with Human-Centric Technology

• mike giambattista • Season 2 • Episode 46

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Discover how The Vitamin Shoppe is revolutionizing the in-store and online shopping experience with insights from Scott Devlin, CTO of The Vitamin Shoppe, and Joe Corbin, CEO of JumpMind. We dive into the technological transformation that is unifying The Vitamin Shoppe's commerce capabilities. As we unveil the features designed to streamline operations and enhance customer satisfaction, learn how innovations like curbside pickup and hybrid checkout systems are bridging the gap between digital and physical retail spaces. Scott shares the strategic journey that began during the pandemic, while Joe highlights the power of JumpMind’s cloud-native platform in supporting this seamless integration.

We also take a closer look at how thoughtful software design is reshaping both associate and customer experiences. By collaborating with a human-centric tech firm, The Vitamin Shoppe is making technology as intuitive as consumer apps, easing the transition for associates and reducing training time. Get an insider perspective on the development of tools that empower "health enthusiasts" to manage multiple functions effortlessly, all while engaging customers effectively. This episode promises to reveal how a consolidated platform not only boosts operational efficiency but also elevates the shopping experience to new heights without the need for additional staff.

Scott Devlin:

We came into this saying we have a super aggressive timeline where we need to get this point of sale rolled out. So we're going to go like for like. We're not going to try to bite off too much more than we can chew and potentially put that timeline at risk. But we were able to deliver a couple of features that are above and beyond what they had before, which really did help with adoption and made people excited about getting it.

Mike Giambattista:

Scott Devlin, who's CTO at Vitamin Shop, and Joe Corbin, who's CEO of JumpMind. Thank you both for joining me, Really appreciate it. We're here to talk about some of the things that are happening at Vitamin Shop by way of JumpMind and we'd love to just kind of hear the reasons why that went into the what technologically. So why don't we start with you, Scott and we've talked a little bit about this over there, but you but what is it you were trying to accomplish if you had a roadmap of goals and milestones with this change?

Scott Devlin:

Absolutely so we're really trying to as we've gone more and more into Omni Channel and Unified Commerce, really needed something in store that was going to keep pace with our digital channel, and what you often find is legacy point of sale that was built 20 years ago doesn't accept all that easily new omnichannel capabilities. So the goal was moving to modern architecture on both was a goal so that we could make sure that when we create an omnichannel capability, that we're able to realize it just as much and just as efficiently in stores as you can online, because a lot of these kind of find themselves the process to be more efficient in the digital channel efficient in the digital channel. So really a platform that was going to support all of our omni-channel unified commerce capabilities and provide a better experience for the customer as well as for our associates. We call them all health enthusiasts.

Mike Giambattista:

So, from start to finish, let's think way back to when this idea of moving into this new grade of Omnichannel was first conceived. How long ago was that?

Scott Devlin:

So Omnichannel we've been heading that direction for more than 10 years. Like everybody else, we took a big step forward at the beginning of the pandemic if you think about the vitamin shop we were. We were deemed in many, in many states, to be a critical retailer and stayed open when maybe some others had to close and we had products that people wanted at that time. So we went really quickly to accelerate our Omni capabilities. We had a buy-on-line pick-up-at-store program. We enhanced that, we added curbside to it. We very quickly pivoted to same-day delivery through marketplaces as well as adding a ship from store capability. So certain products flew out of the distribution center but we had them in 700 stores. So how are we going to access that inventory? So that was really, I would say, the acceleration and fast forward to a couple of years ago now when we said, okay, you want to take a look at our store technology again. We moved quickly to put a lot of that out there.

Scott Devlin:

The in-store experience wasn't exactly what we needed it to be, because we're kind of, you know, bolting some of these capabilities onto, you know, an older platform that didn't readily accept it. We also started down the path of kind of a fully mixed cart from the website of things. So you could build a cart and it's got two items that are going to be shipped to home from a DC, another item that's going to be shipped to home and maybe it gets sourced from a store because it's not in the distribution, and then another buy-on-line pickup in store. So that was kind of a big win at the time. But now, with a new modern website as well as Jumpline Commerce point of sale, my goal is to do that from the store side.

Scott Devlin:

So create a fully mixed cart from the store where maybe you start shopping at home on your app and you add a couple things. You say, well, I'm going to talk to somebody. Our health enthusiasts are the smartest people out there on. You know supplements, you know health and wellness. So go to store and they grab your cart and they pull it up over on the point of sale and maybe say, well, that's not the right thing, take one out. Scan another thing. So maybe end up walking out of the store of two things. There's another thing that's dtc only uh, direct consumer only gets shipped from the dc, and something else you really want today, but it's not in store. But it's in the store across town. So now you've bo-pussed that. I haven't really talked about that in detail with Joe yet, but we've got to do that.

Mike Giambattista:

That's pretty soon. Everybody defines Omnichannel differently. You have different needs, of course, but, joe, you've designed the JumpMind offering with some very specific things in mind and clearly they match up nicely here. But can you talk a little bit about what those things are? Just for no other reason, just for context and orientation to this conversation, for people who may not know.

Joe Corbin:

Yeah, I think it's. You know JumpMind was really designed from the ground up to be built on modern tool sets, so that's you know kind of where it all starts. Cloud native technology, leveraging the greatest things about you know the public clouds leveraging, you know, microservices and the sorts of things that you need to be able to, sure, provide what you're looking for today. But, as Scott's already alluding to things that you want to do tomorrow, right, it's a platform, you know, that Scott and the, the vitamin shop put in, that they can enable the health enthusiast with all of the challenges of today's consumer, but not knowing what the tomorrow's consumer might want, being able to kind of pivot to those.

Joe Corbin:

But when you think of Omni, just kind of in the broader sense, I think it really comes down to, you know, vertical by vertical, specific retailer by specific retailer, providing them the experience that gives them what is omni-channel for their customer. In the case of the vitamin shop, you know that might be to Scott's point. You know, buying something in this store, drop ship something from a DC or from a third-party vendor and then it might be a repeat delivery order or something else, and it's really creating that experience that the associate provides to the customer that enables that to feel frictionless from the customer's perspective. There's obviously a lot of things that are complex behind the scenes to even do something like that, but both the associate and the customer should feel none of that if we've all done our jobs correctly.

Mike Giambattista:

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Joe Corbin:

A couple of ways, I think. One of them is we've looked at it and said exactly kind of what you just alluded to, which is okay, it's. How do you truly make something future-friendly if you continue to add more and more things to it? Right, Just by its nature, it's getting wider and deeper, and doesn't that just make it bigger and heavier? And how does that microservices cloud native thing not just become a monolith like everything else?

Joe Corbin:

And we've done some very, very specific things in the architecture to enable something we call micro capabilities, which is really the idea that you, as a retailer, only deploy the things you're going to use. So there's other solutions in the market where you might deploy Scott. Being in health and wellness, he might be deploying grocery functionality or jewelry functionality or telecommunications functionality. That's part of this broader platform, because it's built as one big, wide and deep thing and for us you really deploy the components that you want and need. So as we add additional capabilities, I don't add them such that Scott has to take them all he might and he might deploy them and he might put them into the cloud and support them in the cloud in that way, but if he doesn't need it, he's not carrying the technical debt of that for a future upgrade or for future enhancements and those sorts of things. So I think it's through being very thoughtful with the way you build and design.

Mike Giambattista:

What's included in it may be even more about what you exclude. Yeah, completely.

Joe Corbin:

Yeah, only include what you need, versus oh, I've got to deploy all this stuff because that's how it comes.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, that's the package deal. Yeah, the package deal. Yeah, I'd like to shift the conversation to the in-store experience for the associates, for your enthusiasts for um and we were talking a moment ago, uh, with gage, about what training looks like for a new system. I mean, it's the, it's the universal deployment headache in store. You know, okay, we've got it, we've got the technical capabilities to do stuff we've never able been able to do before. Now we just have to get the store level on board, trained up, enthusiastic and ready to go. I know we're really really early in that curve, but it sounds to me like, after that quick conversation, like this system's been designed for a really quick access to learning curve. Is there? How have you achieved that? What is that like in store?

Joe Corbin:

Yeah, so maybe I'll take it first. Sure, so just from the perspective of what we do, we very much. We think that to enable an appropriate associate experience, it's through thoughtful intent only, like you can't just hope that it happens. And I think, if you know, we've looked at it and said you know, engineers are building great software. We want to ensure that the experience matches the great software that's underneath.

Joe Corbin:

So we've purposely worked with third parties. We work with a third party human centric design firm just to force ourselves to have to explain the business problem that we're solving with the feature or function to those that aren't dealing with it every day. Because, if I can make it make sense to someone who has no involvement in retail, doesn't work in a store day in and day out, and make it easy for them and then bring it to store associates and understand how the experience is being used in the field. We feel like in the end you get something that operates more like it does for us as consumers, where you download an app from the app store and if you can't figure it out, you delete the thing because it shouldn't be that difficult. So we want Scott to be able to have, you know, new health. New health enthusiasts be hired in and in their program, should be around training them on. You know the benefits of what the vitamin shop has to offer, not. How do I ring out?

Mike Giambattista:

a transaction how?

Joe Corbin:

do I do a return? How do I do a repeat delivery? That should just be intuitive.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, if that's your threshold for success or not, is this operating with the ease and sensibility of an app, and if not, they'll toss it? That's a pretty high bar. Actually.

Joe Corbin:

It is, I think it historically is in the store space. So I think we oftentimes hand our stores. We ask our store associates to do more and more with more apps, more tools. You've got a handheld device for the back that looks like it's made for a warehouse, yet this person's worked in your store for a month. So we've certainly focused on that, because the reality in retail is that you have a lot of turnover and you're hiring people very seasonally. And if I can save Scott and his store operations team one hour per associate on training that they did before, just one hour has a material cost savings over time.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah yeah, from the store side. I know you're fresh into deployment here. From the store side, I know you're fresh into deployment here. I don't know if there's enough data or experience to really understand how the adoption is going, but you've been in charge of kind of mapping out those plans. So with this technology, yes, it's easier. But what steps are you taking to try and ensure that adoption and understanding and utility are quickly understood?

Scott Devlin:

Absolutely. So I think a couple things. One is the kind of have no choice but to adopt it, since we're swapping out the old and bringing in the new. So they're there. One thing, though, that I think was really good we came into this saying we have a super aggressive timeline where we need to get this point of sale rolled out. So we're going to go like for like. We're not going to try to bite off too much you know more than we can chew and potentially put that timeline at risk but we were able to deliver a couple of features that are above and beyond what they had before, which really did help with adoption and made people excited about getting it.

Scott Devlin:

So one is that previously, our health enthusiasts would have to go into a separate app on the iPad, a clienteling app, if they wanted to take a customer's points and convert them to an award. Oh wow, they can now do that in transaction, which they love and the customer loves, and we've seen a huge jump in those awards being created and redeemed in the stores that have the new solution. And then the other, above and beyond, is with the customer display. Our subscription, as you might expect, is a big deal for us and the customer display. Now we will ask if something is eligible for our auto delivery program. We'll say, hey, would you like to sign up for auto delivery? If you do, you can save today and on your future orders. And now it pops up on that customer display and says, hey, if you sign up for auto delivery, you can save. And I think that what we saw up there was $471 today and just that popping right in the customer's face. Our health enthusiasts have said it makes it easier. You know, we're not having to do all the communication, it's right there.

Scott Devlin:

So those, I think the adding some things that are new and that they've wanted or maybe they didn't know they wanted was certainly helpful. I do think the other part, going back to the very beginning of this whole process, of bringing our store operations partners along for the ride, step by step, with us, was helpful in adoption. So they partnered the whole way. It wasn't something being done to them, it was something they were doing alongside with us. And when we got to the project phase, we built a task force that spanned our store field leadership, our stores themselves, our field training folks. So having a task force that was along from the beginning, providing feedback. Providing input to what was going to be delivered, providing feedback when we got to pilot. That really helped us to prepare as much as you really can for what you're going to experience when you start rolling out more broadly.

Mike Giambattista:

I know there's an entire CX mindset behind so much of what you're doing, Joe. Can you tell us a little about that?

Joe Corbin:

Yeah, so what Scott's talking about. So we have a customer display we call it CX Connect which is really putting an experience in front of the customer. So obviously the associate we're talking about POS the associate has an experience and that's where they're scanning items, adding things to a transaction or an order, whatever it might be. But CX Connect is really this interactive device that's then facing them as the customer. So the customer can see, as Scott was just talking about loyalty points, I might want to convert something to a reward, be able to see that directly in front of me or, in the case of repeat delivery, being able to create those orders and see that directly in front of my screen as the consumer, versus the associate or the health enthusiast being the one that asks the question.

Joe Corbin:

Right, you know, oftentimes these transactions in a retail location are, you know, finished by a series of questions Would you like to do this? Would you like to do that? Would you like an email or a you know, or a paper receipt? Do you need a bag, like all these questions that come and they just they feel very transactional by the name, obviously, versus being interactive. So CX Connect's about kind of creating that interactivity and we've got a number of things we're doing in the in the next I don't know next quarter or two to really further blur the lines and create what we're kind of calling hybrid checkout, to where I've got really both parties the associate and the customer really engaged in the transaction together and really providing value, kind of a more valuable experience to that customer where they can feel like they're in a digital, just like it would be if they were in their digital shopping experience on their phone or on the website at home Can you elaborate on what that might look like.

Joe Corbin:

Yeah, so at a high level. What we're trying to do is take things like the points that we just talked about and allow you to convert it. If I'm sitting at the cash wrap and Scott was the health enthusiast that was scanning items for me why shouldn't I be able to see my order history or view the fact that, hey, I do have a subscription that's upcoming and is about to ship next week or whatever it might be? All these things that you're hit in the face with when you're online and we, naturally, are used to engaging with as consumers why is it different when I come into the store and the reality is in a POS solution? That's pretty typical. It's different because it has to be, because it's me talking to the associate. But if I can put that in front of the consumer, then the consumer can actually look at that stuff and kind of do it directly.

Scott Devlin:

We know at the Vitamin Shop that our health enthusiasts are our biggest asset. They're our strategic advantage, the knowledge that they can use to help the customer. So we need to make sure that we're putting them in the best position to be successful. And you can see here, just with a couple of people, we don't have an army of folks in the store, so we don't have someone as we continue to roll more and more Omni capabilities.

Scott Devlin:

You know we're Instacart same day delivery with Instacart DoorDash. You know you name it and we put more and more of that in the stores. You know that's on top of their day job, which is keeping the product on the shelves, helping the customers. So we need to make sure that they can handle all that efficiently. And you know, if we're not going to add people when we keep you adding capabilities, it's got to be because we're making things more efficient and giving them the right tools to do the job. So you know you talk about today it's. It's not ideal and we're working to get it better. So today that you know I have to go to one place to handle, you know, pick by line, pick up at store orders and ship to home orders and go to another place to look up purchase history or to convert rewards, then another place to check somebody out. Now we've started the process with JumpMind in moving those things to one place, so ideally it becomes a lot easier to do multiple things at the same time, which you know. That's what they're doing.

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