Walmart wants to engage with its existing customers digitally: Fiona Tan

New Delhi: Walmart Labs is using the vast database of its offline customers to create its omni-channel identity, said Fiona Tan, senior vice-president of Walmart Labs while delivering a keynote address at EmTech India 2018 on Thursday.

Tan, who joined Walmart in 2014, is responsible for customer technology at Walmart Labs across their e-commerce properties and physical stores.

Walmart Labs, a part of the $485 billion Walmart Inc., develops software solutions to enhance the shopping experience of the retail chain’s millions of customers around the globe.

“The big question we are trying to find answers to is how do we make sure that we digitally engage with our existing consumers that are shopping with us in our stores,” added Tan.

The company has deep customer penetration worldwide with 11,000 stores across 28 countries. It employs 2.2 million associates globally.

To further aide this seamless shopping experience, the company has built its customer backbone, a repository of all customer shopping data at Walmart. It uses this data to build different models as part of its digital relationships.

“These are products that are value added services that our store customers might be able to use and build deeper relationships with those store customers to unlock their online and offline activities together,” explained Tan.

Pickup Discount (discount applied to total order if customer elects to pick up items in store versus shipping to their home), Easy Reorder (shortens the time customers spend placing an order by pre-populating their accounts with items based on their purchase history) and Easy Returns (customers initiate the returns process themselves and complete the final step in store, shortening their transaction time in the store) are some of these services.

A 23-year industry veteran and alumna of Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tan is in India to attend EmTech India 2018—an emerging technology conference organised by Mint and MIT Technology Review.