Providing a great customer experience is at the forefront of the evolution of 7-Eleven, and Tribe Lead – Channel, Braeden Lord told C&I that the future of 7-Eleven would be digitally led.
“Our relaunched app, My 7-Eleven, our newest service 7-Eleven Delivery, as well as our e-commerce platforms, will help us to gain a better understanding of what our customers want from us,” he said.
“Our digital journey is about giving our customers a seamless experience that adds value to them, across both our digital and physical environments.
“As always our customers continue to be our focus, and 2021 will be about enabling a digitally led future of convenience retail, to bring customers the products and services they want, when they want them, where they want them.”
Lord says that store formats will also continue to be a focus for 7-Eleven as they test and learn about what their customers want and what convenience means to them.
“We’re really excited to see the results of our microformat trial store in Brisbane over the first 12 months so we can understand more about how this format might add value to our customers.
“We are listening to our customers, and they are telling us they love these kinds of new format shopping options. We led the industry with our first cashless cardless store at Church Street, Richmond and we will continue to expand on new store format models into 2021.
“There are lots of questions we are working to answer as we learn more about where our customers want us to be. Is it train stations or in offices or delivering to homes? Or delivering to the local park or beach? Is it being present in more regional communities? It’s going to be fascinating to see the evolution in the channel over the next few years but a tech-led, format and food focussed future will dominate 7-Eleven’s strategy.”
7-Eleven has also been finessing its food offering, again with convenience at the centre of its evolution.
“Over the last decade, we’ve led the way through establishing consumer credibility in food on the go in convenience. We’ve invested in growing the coffee, sandwich, sushi and salad categories particularly.
“We’ve been able to grow our coffee offer from an average seven cups per store per day in 2009, to now selling more than 80 million cups a year. The work of the teams over time has made our stores a destination for coffee, and the convenience channel more broadly is now following on the work we’ve done to ensure that the coffee offer across our industry is of a very high standard,” Lord told C&I.
“If the last year has taught us one thing it’s that there is absolutely no slowing down. The future of convenience is going to be super-fast, super charged and ultra-convenient.
“We’re always looking to meet the needs of our customers to ensure we have what they need, when they need it, and where they need it. It’s going to be exciting to see what that will look like over the next 10 years and into the future.”
The August issue of C&I Retailing Magazine will take a look inside 7-Eleven Melton, Victoria – a store that has embraced 7-Eleven’s digital technology and is using it to better understand and cater to its local customers.
Which is all well and good, and maybe some SA stores are in that future too (and not a moment too soon).