Meeting the customer 'why'

Walmart started as one discount store in a small town in Arkansas, USA. Sam Walton, our founder, believed he could bring a broad assortment of quality merchandise at a good value to customers in small towns. And he did. 

As the company has grown to serve people all around the world, our customers and members still count on us for those things–which include the best value on quality merchandise and services, a broad assortment, an enjoyable experience shopping for those things and to do business with someone they trust–but the ways we now deliver them have changed from when we began. 

Adapting to customer context is critical 

We use technology in service of people. Recent innovations enable us to adapt to customers and members by bringing the core shopping aspects together in a seamless way. What this transformation means is that we find ourselves in a new era—the era of Adaptive Retail. This era is defined by profoundly personal shopping experiences delivered through technological innovation that does the work for customers and members. Every individual defines how, where, when and why they obtain products and technology adapts itself to meet them where they are. 

A search bar is no longer the fastest path to purchase. Customers shop within a myriad of contexts. They may be focused on the essentials they want in their house every day, like bread or milk. For these customers, we can use Machine Learning (ML) to predict when they typically need these everyday items and deliver them directly into their refrigerator, exactly when they need them. Through seamless integration of automation and data, we can treat customers’ homes as nodes in the supply chain and eliminate the burden of shopping for essentials. 

Mission-driven shopping fulfills a bigger plan, such as getting kids back-to-school ready. We integrated Generative AI (GenAI) into our site and app, so customers can search for items in intuitive ways. For example, a parent might ask, “What does my 5th grader need for school?” and we’re able to surface everything from pencils to backpacks, musical instruments to nutritious snacks. Our goal is to make shopping even more convenient. 

Customer-defined experiences 

Walmart recently commissioned the 2024 State of Adaptive Retail Report. I encourage everyone in the retail space to read it. 

The overarching takeaways validated what we believed to be true: retailers need to predict shoppers’ needs, reduce decision-making, enable highly personal experiences and meet them where they are. But how we get there and what that could look like is not up to the retailer, it’s up to customers to define the experiences we deliver. 

For instance, being ‘inspired’ is a key shopping context–it’s about discovering desired items, anywhere. The report quantifies just how often customers shop while fully immersed in other activities. Younger shoppers aren’t doing traditional product searches. Shopping is often a byproduct of something else. They find inspiration everywhere–in pop culture, social media and gaming, nearly as often as they find it on retailer websites. To meet inspired shoppers where they are, we’re integrating unified shopping experiences into newer platforms like TikTok and then we’re making it easier to buy without having to leave the site. (According to the survey, nearly half of the U.S. shopping population wants to buy within 10 seconds of seeing a desired item.) 

Another shopping context the survey validated is “precision” shopping–the hunt for something specific which requires us to know each customer’s precise personal preferences. They want a new case for a phone. They need tires for their car. Shoppers want retailers to be ready for them–ready with hyper-specific recommendations, ready to adapt offerings to match needs and ready to deliver. GenAI-powered chat functions can ask intelligent questions to narrow a vast online catalog to a handful of recommended items and ML can further personalize them based on individual preferences. 

Our success in this new era depends on how well we use technology to anticipate and adapt to these evolving expectations. 

Enabling the future 

Our team has been preparing for this shift for years because as we power the present, we also must provide solutions for tomorrow. This is how we enable the future. 

We’re always integrating emerging technologies into each aspect of the shopping journey and we have processes in place that enable a virtuous loop of testing, learning and iterating. 

Over the next few months, I’m visiting many of our offices around the world with the goal of listening to our associates. I expect to learn how our Global Tech team can continue to support them and importantly, what they’re seeing and hearing from our customers and members. 

Adaptive Retail is people-led and tech-powered. Our job is to be ready.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.