Sanjay Patney, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Union Coop.Walk into any supermarket on a Friday afternoon and you can tell, within a minute, whether the brand is being delivered by the people inside it. The stocked aisles, the staff posture, the till queues, the way a shopper is greeted at fresh produce. None of it is marketing in the textbook sense. All of it is the brand. It explains why the question I am most often asked carries a flawed assumption: how does a business build a customer experience worth having whilst delivering the numbers a board expects this quarter? The orthodoxy treats those as two problems, budgeted and sequenced apart. It is the most expensive habit our industry has yet to break.
For too long, customer experience has been written up as a slow, compounding brand asset, and growth as the urgent commercial conversation. One sits with marketing, the other with commercial. In most organisations they meet once a quarter and argue about spend. The customer does not experience any of that. She experiences a single relationship with our brand, and either it earns her the next visit or it does not. At Union Coop, we have made data the operating language of customer experience. What to range, where to invest, when to intervene. Every call is taken against evidence.
The first challenge is that most of us have been answering the wrong question about what customers want. When we asked our shoppers directly, the answer was less obvious than the industry tells itself. Two-thirds told us ‘great value’ meant quality that matches the price paid, not the lowest price on the shelf. More than half wanted to feel they were getting more than just low prices. Affordability mattered. So did reliability of stock, fair pricing on premium products, and a loyalty programme that rewarded them rather than enrolled them. Value, it turns out, is a portfolio.
The retailers who win this region will be those who stop treating it as a single number. That insight led us to a harder choice. Rather than chase the next campaign, we made ‘Great Value, Every Day’ our North Star and translated that promise into four operating pillars.
We value ‘better’, because good enough is not the standard for quality or execution. We value ‘loyalty’, because relationships matter more than transactions, and trust is earned by showing up. We value ‘time’, because for the modern shopper it is the scarcest currency. We value ‘choice’, because more options mean less compromise. None of these is a slogan.
Each is a discipline, and a discipline is only as good as the person delivering it: the colleague on the shop floor, the picker in the fulfilment centre, the team leader reading the dashboard at seven in the morning. Customer experience and employee experience must share the same DNA, or neither is real.
The second challenge is structural. Most marketing teams are organised in a way that forces a choice between acquisition, retention and monetisation. Acquisition teams chase a cost-per-customer that ignores what happens after week six. Retention teams optimise journeys for people who were never the right customers to begin with. Monetisation lives on a commercial spreadsheet.
Customer experience is filed as a separate pillar with its own net promoter score (NPS) report. We have tried to collapse that. Our loyalty app programme, Tamayaz, was designed to serve all three at once, and paid back within six months. We added one hundred and eighty-six thousand new customers this year, contributing AED142m in revenue, whilst bringing churn down and lifting basket value. One asset, three returns, because we stopped designing for one at a time.
The third challenge is our relationship with failure. Experimentation sits at the heart of any real growth exercise, yet most teams treat it as evidence of poor planning. The pace at which a business is willing to fail intelligently is the single best predictor of how quickly it will grow. We moved monthly acquisition from seven and a half thousand customers to fifteen thousand not by finding a clever idea, but by building a cycle that lets us be wrong quickly and correct.
A brief word on artificial intelligence (AI). The temptation is to chase the generative and the photogenic. The quieter returns sit in the less glamorous work: a churn-propensity model that flags a high-value shopper before she drifts; a next-best-offer engine that stops us sending a family-of-six promotion to a single professional. AI is not a separate revolution. It lets a retailer of our scale listen the way a neighbourhood shopkeeper once did.
It is high time we stopped treating customer experience as a brand exercise and started treating it as a commercial discipline, owned in equal measure by those who design it and those who deliver it. Those who do will earn the next visit. That is the only metric that matters.
By Sanjay Patney, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Union Coop.
