“Make My Day” — Experimenting with acts of kindness

At Sainsbury’s we prioritise our customers by delivering great customer service where it matters. We introduced the “I Care” programme in 2021 as an initiative to increase colleague interaction with our customers on the shop floor. This really turbo charges our ability to make it better for customers in their stores every day through the service they give.

We are adopting an experimental approach with the I Care programme, working with colleagues and customers to iterate and adapt ideas before rolling out. The experiment that I led on this is called “Make My Day”.

Make My Day is about empowering colleagues to go above and beyond for customers to do something lovely to make their day. The way I explain it is; if a colleague is chatting to a customer in-store and they learn that it is the customer’s birthday, they can gift them a birthday cake there and then. Seems simple right? In theory it is, but the reality of designing and rolling out such an initiative across an estate of 900 plus stores with 160,000 plus colleagues is a little more challenging.

Paying a visit to highly engaged colleagues in our Hawick trial store

We tested our first iteration of Make My Day in two stores. Feedback was positive — colleagues loved the increased autonomy, customers loved Make My Day moments. The stores also saw a bump to their customer satisfaction scores.

The second trial was with 10 stores. There was more diversity among the stores now and we gained richer insights. There were plenty of positives — colleagues still loved doing Make My Day, customers still loved receiving a Make My Day. Customers were talking about it too — posting on Facebook, dropping thank you cards in-store, adding lovely comments to customer satisfaction surveys. Customer satisfactions scores were continuing to move in the right direction across the 10 stores.

However, on store visits, we did notice that not all colleagues were using Make My Day and there were a few reasons for this:

1. The process to put a gift through the till was complex. Colleagues needed to carry out 9 steps to complete the transaction. This was off-putting and confusing, especially for colleagues who don’t use the till every day.
2. Needing to come to the till to process the transaction could sometimes break the spontaneity of the moment with a customer. It was awkward, especially in bigger stores, to walk a customer all the way up to the till at the front of the store to process their gifted product.
3. Colleagues are so loyal to Sainsbury’s and protective of profits that they were really reluctant to “give away things for free”.

Positive customer feedback for our store manager in Sainsbury’s Local, Birmingham

We took these findings onboard and figured out how to address them. I spoke with product people, UX designers and retail leadership to prototype a new method of processing Make My Day which colleagues can do on their own smart device anywhere throughout a store. The end-to-end design team and I worked with store leadership and the communications team to help support and reassure colleagues who were wary of using Make My Day. Perhaps most importantly, I also put together a business case to spell out the potential customer, colleague and commercial benefit of the initiative.

We ran our third and largest store trial in January 2022. The aims of which were:

• To test whether the new Make My Day process works on colleagues’ own devices
• To test the support and training we have created to increase communication and adoption of Make My Day
• To identify which store types (e.g. large or small stores, higher or lower performers) might benefit most from Make My Day

Hand written card from a customer expressing their gratitude for a Make My Day gift

The Takeaway

Five months since our first Make My Day trial launched, were were still in the trial phase. It would have been easy to get disheartened by this. However, looking under the bonnet, we have made huge progress. Make My Day went from a tentative idea to a validated process showing signs of improving customer satisfaction and colleague engagement scores. The business case for it was painful to build but really helped in getting buy-in and engagement from senior stakeholders. And we also gained a detailed understanding of the strengths and limitations of the idea and how we can tweak it to maximise its impact.

Celebrating Make My Day (previously Solve It) moments in Coventry

I moved from agency side to design in-house for Sainsbury’s to really get stuck into implementation, and Make My Day gave me the perfect chance to do this. It was a steep but valuable learning curve. More than anything, it’s re-enforced my belief that, for the most part, ideas are cheap but making them happen is hard.

Services are the sum of many, many parts of an organisation. It takes a lot to identify, understand and influence the direction of all those parts. And to figure out the right moment to relinquish control and carefully hand the reins to operational teams to deliver.

I remember reading a tweet a few years ago along the lines of “every experienced service designer eventually comes to the conclusion that to have real impact they must tackle organisational design”. As a service designer who’s been with Make My Day from the beginning, I think the best thing I did for it was to learn how to align the structure, workflows and resources of Sainsbury’s to line up with the Make My Day vision.

Here’s to becoming a service, organisational designer hybrid!