How we empowered more than 100,000 customers in the middle of a crisis

Written by Callum Kilby and Rosi Holdsworth

Let’s be honest, it’s almost impossible to describe the events of this year without falling back on that tired cliché. You know the one. The one that littered every news broadcast, every marketing email and every other political speech.

But in fairness to all of us who’ve said it over the past few months, these really are unprecedented times.

And for the Sainsbury’s Digital teams, the unprecedented global pandemic, the unprecedented national lockdown, and the new unprecedented ways of working came together to present us with some unprecedented challenges:

• For starters, how do we feed the nation?

Panic buying in stores mixed with a huge shift towards online orders meant that the most vulnerable people couldn’t get the groceries they needed.

• So, how do we register the most vulnerable people to get priority delivery slots?

With (sorry) an unprecedented amount of call volumes, our customer service teams found themselves at complete capacity, so they were unable to manually register the most vulnerable people for priority delivery.

• In that case, how do we decrease the calls to our customer service teams?

With so many customers calling our customer service teams, we had to find digital solutions that meant customers could self-serve any issues rather than needing the help of one of our agents.

Feeling the strain

With millions of customers coming to the Sainsbury’s Groceries website in the first weeks of lockdown, it became clear that the seemingly small problems of the user experience were actually causing huge problems because of the scale of the traffic.

From difficulties registering, to struggles in booking a delivery slot, to a customer even accessing their account, every usability issue on the website came under intense scrutiny from new and old customers. And ultimately, every time a customer had one of these issues, it led to another call to our customer service team.

We realised early on that one of the biggest sources of call traffic came from customers with locked accounts.

The password problem

As lockdown began we saw a new wave of returning customers trying to access their existing accounts. These customers might have last logged into Sainsbury’s weeks ago, months ago, or even years ago. This meant most of these customers couldn’t remember the passwords they initially set for their accounts.

Now, this would be fine in most experiences. Customers could guess a few times and then ultimately go down the reset password journey. That’s what you’d probably expect from a lot of experiences.

5 strikes and you’re out

The way the Sainsbury’s Groceries website was set up meant that, due to security procedures to try and prevent account hacking, a customer only had five attempts to enter the correct password before their account became locked.

Once a customer had guessed too many times and locked their account, the only way they could access their account again was to call our customer service team and get an agent to manually unlock their account.

Manual unlocking

As you can imagine, this led to a lot of traffic on our phone lines. In fact, around a month after lockdown began it was estimated that a massive 30% of all the calls our customer service teams received was a customer trying to unlock their account.

At its peak, there was nearly 6,000 calls a week just for this one problem. It’s obvious to say, but we needed a solution.

Letting customers unlock their own account

With every day that passed, call volumes and customer frustration were increasing in equal measure, so we were under pressure to deliver on a solution. To speed up the goal we were working towards, we split the solution into distinct phases. The phases centered around the idea of what we could do now, and what we needed to do next.

Phase 1:

• To make the customer aware of the consequence of too many failed password attempts
• To direct the customer to resetting their password after their fourth failed attempt

Phase 2:

• To allow the customer to use the password reset journey in order to unlock their account themselves, so they wouldn’t need to call one of our agents

Getting the message right

With designers, developers and copywriters collaborating remotely, we worked together to get the messaging right for Phase 1 of this solution.

Previously, the incorrect password error message served a simple function: tell users they had entered the wrong password, then ask them to try again.

But now we needed to tell them what had happened, how many password attempts they had left, what would happen after that many attempts, and what they could do to avoid getting their account locked.

That could quite easily become quite a lengthy error message. So we split the error message into three clear sentences.

Sorry, that email or password doesn’t look right.

This confirms to the user what’s happened and why we’re showing them the error.

You have 3 log in attempts before we’ll lock your account for security purposes.

This warns the user of how many attempts they have left and the consequences of too many incorrect password attempts.

You can reset your password below.

This gives the user a clear way to avoid getting their account locked.

Getting the message live

Once the first phase of this solution was finalised, it was time to get it live. At this point, the sheer amount work on feeding the nation had continued to grow, and getting this solution the priority it needed to be built would be a challenge.

With a dedicated channel on Microsoft Teams, as a team we were able to collect information and key stats on the issue in order to push stakeholders into realising the gravity of the problem.

With stats surrounding the number of calls into the customer service teams, the number of customers with locked accounts, plus customer feedback from social media, we were able to escalate the issue to our senior leadership team who gave us the green light to get the work into production.

Instant results

Once we released the new error message as our first phase, we were able to release the second phase a day later. And we saw an instant impact. Within 48 hours of the solution being released we saw a 55% decrease in calls about locked accounts.

Just before our solution was released, we saw that more than 5,000 customers currently had locked accounts with Sainsbury’s Groceries. This meant when we set phase 2 live, we gave all those customers, plus our entire customer base, the ability to unlock their accounts without needing to call customer service.

What we’re doing now

Following the success of this solution, we’re now working hard to introduce a new account journey which will allow customers of both Sainsbury’s Groceries and Nectar to unlock their accounts using email and SMS verification.

As well as this, the success of allowing our customers to self-serve issues has meant we’re now looking at more and more opportunities to create better self-serve flows.