Closer to the Colleague: Screwfix's Omnichannel Playbook

[00:00:00] Matthew Small: Nobody got us closer to our customer. This gets IT closer to our colleagues. How many times does it cost or a colleague phone up the help desk and say, I've got a problem. I'd like to report an incident. And the cut the the help desk goes, fine. Yes. Can you remember what you did? Let no. We were able to take what and see what the colleagues were experiencing.

[00:00:20] Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of the ecommerce toolbox expert's perspective. Joining us today, all the way over from The UK, we got mister Matt Small, a good friend of good friend of Noiboo, even better customer. Welcome, Matt.

[00:00:33] Matthew Small: Okay. Good to be here, Kylan. Looking forward to it.

[00:00:36] Kailin Noivo: Matt, why don't you kick us off with a brief introduction of your role at Screwfix and maybe just a brief overview of your career journey.

[00:00:45] Matthew Small: Sure. So I am responsible and accountable for all of the run services across Screwfix. Screwfix is a a company that deals with mainly trade people and sells DIY equipment and plumbing, electricians. Huge stock. We have a thousand stores in The UK and websites across UK, France, and Ireland. So it keeps you quite busy. Career wise, I started off a long time ago in IT services running running services for Autoglass in The UK, and then went into Marks and Spencer, Whitbread, which Premier Inn, and lately, Salford's to run their service design and transition teams. So I've had experience both on the coalface understanding how our services, uh, how to run a service, but also the thoughts and the processes that sit behind it in terms of design, how to design a service, how to create a service from scratch, and unified everything back into this this to now run everything at scale. So it's been quite a journey, but but I really enjoy it. Screwfix is one of the biggest UK retail websites, incredibly busy, and we pride ourselves on our speed and reliance to our customers. As you can imagine, tradespeople, they don't have a lot of time. So they meant to whenever they visit our website, they need to make sure that that what we present to them works works first time. And we have such speed. So if you order online, you are able to collect from the store within one minute. So if you can imagine the amount of tech that goes behind maintaining that, it's pretty impressive. It means my service teams have to be absolutely on the ball for anything that hits that might be slightly incorrect. We have to know about it. We have to correct it. We have to get things going as soon as we possibly can. Downtime costs a lot of money. So, yeah, it's, uh, an always on job. Doesn't stop. 03:00 in the morning is not an unusual time for me to get involved in stuff, but, um, that's that's what we all love. That's why I do this job. It's, uh, keeps me going.

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[00:02:55] Kailin Noivo: We obviously met a few years ago. Maybe talk to us a bit about why you and your teams decided to initially procure Noiboo. What was the kind of problem and the use cases that you were looking at initially, and how has that evolved over time as as now you've kind of deeply embedded the product in in different areas? So, yeah, maybe talk us through that.

[00:03:15] Matthew Small: So when we first spoke, the issue that I was facing was we couldn't it's connection to customs. So we had lots of we had some monitoring that looked at the back end, looked at the log files, looked at those particular things, but our connection to our customers is very much disparate. We relied on customers phoning our call center and telling us a problem that they had or telling us about a problem that they had for us to then initiate a call and to start having a look from a customer perspective what was there. So we had very little visibility about what the customer was actually seeing and what the customer experience was from an error management perspective. We had the Google side of things and those those elements, but, again, they were not particularly real time, not particularly time or speedy for what we wanted. So when I started talking to the NoVoIP team, I was like, this is very interesting because this is an area that I don't think we have invested a lot of money in, a lot of a lot of time in. And it provided me with an option for moving beyond the log file view of the world, which is I have a thousand error five hundreds. Which one of them is important? Which one's the one that I wanna look at? Which ones are not important? Do I wanna spend my time chasing tails chasing avenues that have a no consequence to my customer, or what do I wanna catch the two or three that have huge impact to my customer? And annoyed they've allowed us to begin the journey to to to that particular to that particular place. So it's currently live running across our Irish sites and our French sites, giving great visibility of the what the customer journey is and what the customer experiences are and allows us to, again, prioritize the errors. But the biggest move, I think, we've had of late is we have upgraded all of our website away from single monolithic application stack into into the mult the microservice SaaS linked services. So, again, there's a lot of SaaS services linked together with with integrations, and that provides our our that supplies all our website. So moving away from that on the web, obviously, was was really key. Visibility was actually really key for that lot. But Screwfix is an omnichannel retailer, so the website was not the only place we wanted to go. We wanted to actually take the same technology we have running on the web and roll it out into our stores Because every the whole ethos is is that just to maintain that customer promise of of one minute from order to store reception, we needed everything to be unified onto a single platform. So in doing that, we've now started to roll out what is our web technologies into our stores. So the point of sale services are now gonna be running on the same technology that the stores are. And the first time, we we suddenly thought, hang on a second. We have a tool that allows us to actually see what the colleague does that sat in store. So we've rolled Noibir out onto our tills now or beginning process of rolling it out. Again, it's live in Ireland as initial an initial stage. We're gonna start rolling that out at the end of this month across the rest of the state. It's really important because, like, it nobody got us closer to our customer. This gets IT closer to our colleagues. So if a colleague has a problem with a till, they're trying to do a transaction, it fails for whatever reason, um, we can now get view of exactly what that colleague does because, you know, how many times does a does a customer or a customer colleague phone up the help desk and say, I've got a problem. I'd like to report an incident. And the the the help desk goes, fine. Yes. Can you remember what you did? No. No. No. I have I I pressed some buttons, and some stuff happened. Do you remember what the error was? Not really. And so, actually, for the first time, we have used it really, really well to to it's right at the initial stages of this project. So when it went out there, we were able to take what and see what the custom what the colleagues were experiencing. And, actually, it helped us massively solve a bunch of bugs we would have never found from deep log files. So it really pointed the way and find that to to highlight where problems were, where they were on the journey, and to give us colleagues some confidence that, actually, IT was listening to them and looking at what they were doing. And we were not relying on the individual to to report exactly what it was that they happened. We could just see it straight away through the session replay. So that's a really good change from where we started off doing this with NoiBoot to now the journey we're going on with NoiBoot in this sort of new environment, which I guess is very new for you guys as well.

[00:07:51] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. And and, really, this podcast series is all about expanding from a single use case to multiuse case. We wanna be a platform used across multiple departments in multiple different contexts, and that's a great example. Right? So when you initially kinda brought us in, we it was mainly for, basically, bug prioritization based on economic impact, enables you to connect customer queries to to bugs, understand their scope and scale, and then resolve them. From there, obviously, we've now a product that didn't exist when you were initially procured Noiboo in the real time dashboards is something that I know that you use fairly often for real time alerting and just be basically, being able to see these error rates and these endpoint latency and all these different things in in real time. And then above and beyond that, you helped kind of co innovate a different use case, which is an internal use case for your your POS system and your in store. So that's something that we're now kind of leaning into as well, centered around the theme of of omnichannel.

[00:08:56] Matthew Small: So Commercetools in store is the product we're using. We use Commercetools on the web as well. But with Commercetools starting off new, it's working quite closely with them and giving also giving them some insights as to how their their system behaves as well. So, yeah, it's very, very useful. The the help code functionality is especially useful because, like I said, when a colleague clicks and gives us a a help code, we can straightaway see their session and and begin to start working on triaging it and figuring out what's gone wrong and feeding back to them, uh, the developers where the problems are, uh, with the brand new product. So it's very helpful for that regard.

[00:09:35] Kailin Noivo: Amazing. As we're looking to really keep expanding the use cases, I know we're chatting about mobile app and expanding web properties. But a question for you, what's one of the top themes right now around technology consolidation, making sure that tools don't have too much overlap, which is maybe different from five years ago during the COVID kind of era. What are you seeing in your role centered around effectively tool consolidation and things like that?

[00:10:03] Matthew Small: So like every business, cost is key. Making sure costs are kept down as much as possible is absolutely key, and we are challenged on that as is everybody else. Utilizing some of the more business facing elements of Neuville, we're beginning to explore what is possible within our estate. We we've got lots of people are quite fond of buying tools to do specific things, and and and having a tool which does come over the top of everything is really important to try and consolidate that down to try and get a much smoother, more efficient operation so you're not having to look and also integrate other tools as well. So, yes, we do have integration between Nuvo and Datadog, for instance, which looks at all our logs and manages our back end logs on on the APM levels. But there are some business facing tools that we wanna get we wanna try to use Noibud to replace and to consolidate it in so everyone's on the one tool that gets the one view of the customer, um, which for everybody's benefit will be more efficient and, obviously, more effective.

[00:11:02] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense, and that's kind of one of the the themes that we're we're hearing as well is people wanna unify their their their systems into into one to really save cost, but also increase efficiency so So that when you're trying to compare when you're trying to compare different teams with the same data, you're not looking at conflicting data, which I know happens sometimes. So when you're looking at errors in system x versus systems y, and then things are kinda calculated differently. So, no, that's definitely a challenge that that we've seen. Maybe talk to us a bit about a use case that maybe you haven't been able to leverage Noid before yet or one that we don't support yet that you think we we should consider.

[00:11:41] Matthew Small: So I just had this conversation with Phil, to be honest. The so as as the end to end journey becomes less monolithic and more grouped into small systems together, Having something to unify a way of bringing in the journey of an order as it progresses through various system after system after system, and to maintain that consistency of of view of that order, and to also put in so the stuff the stuff that you do about the error management and the error prioritization and the sort of ethos you bring to the party for this particular thing, I've chatted to explore and to have conversations with you guys about whether or not that's something that you can bring in and we can bring into the more end to end view in order. At this stage, we're not there yet, but the fact that we're having this conversation is great because it allows me to to bounce ideas off you guys, and you guys are going, actually, no. We're not doing this now. We might consider it in the future. And that's fantastic for me because it means, again, to the point I don't have to go looking elsewhere. I can think about utilizing Nooboo more effectively across my end to end staff than I can do just looking at the front end. But it's the ethos about how you manage AI AI you bring AI into it to to make things more understandable at a at a lower I don't have to be a really good engineer to understand stuff that's presented to me in. I can be I'm I'm not actually that technical. I just know the people who are technical. The question is, can I get them the information in a way that I understand it quickly to them, really, so that they can understand and do the deep dive with all the really techy stuff that they need to know? So linking that kind of stuff up, not just on the front, but also some of the other elements of the systems, would be really useful.

[00:13:17] Kailin Noivo: Makes sense. So bringing the type of intelligence and usability that we brought to the front end also to the back end.

[00:13:26] Matthew Small: Yeah. Pretty much. Like I said, it's it's I had this I had this chat with with your CTO, Phil, about what the art of the possible was, And, um, it was a really good conversation, to be honest. It was a really good conversation. So, yeah, it probably may not go anywhere because you guys are good at what you do. And you may not want to go on an absolute right angle, but for me, it really helped me. So I just as that's kind of the partnership we have. I get to ask awkward questions of you guys, and and you guys go away and have a think about it, which is really good.

[00:13:53] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. That's awesome. Well, Matt, I appreciate you joining and giving us a bit of context around why you initially procured Noibu, how it's evolved in in different use cases over time. Uh, this was a a a a really great chat. Obviously, we appreciate our partnership with you guys. You guys are a great business, and you guys are doing some really, really innovative things, especially around being able to pick up orders less than sixty seconds. That's pretty that's pretty insane. So appreciate you hopping on that and, uh, really, really enjoyed our conversation.

[00:14:23] Matthew Small: Thanks. Good to chat to you again.

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