NorgesGruppen

The future consumer experience with NorgesGruppen

NorgesGruppen is Norway’s 5th largest company, and the most prominent player in the Norwegian grocery retail market. They also have a considerable footprint in production and wholesale (ASKO) as well as grocery retail, industrial householding and catering. NorgesGruppen has approximately 1800 consumer goods stores and over 41.000 employees across their different grocery chains like Kiwi, Spar, Joker and Meny.

Customer

NorgesGruppen

Year

2018–now

Responsibilities

UX Design
Design research
Development and architecture
Data Science
Business Development
Data Science

Areas

Service platform

The assignment

NorgesGruppen wants to offer Norway's best loyalty program for its customers through the Trumf initiative, online shopping options and personalized campaigns and offers based on each individual member. Throughout their well-known grocery stores, they aim to simplify the everyday lives of their customers by offering relevant and personalized services. This is due to the fact that over the next few years, the grocery retail market will face rapid changes and disruption by new and large international players. As a result, it has become increasingly important to promote sustainable models, consistently be customer-oriented and be proactive with trends and new markets that are being created.

Assignment from NorgesGruppen:

  • To develop a more innovative and advanced digital service platform and update the existing technical architecture through the entire company
  • Concept development and consulting for different grocery stores within the company
  • Test and validate technical and/or commercial projects, and new business models

Technology and deliverables

  • Technology stack: .NET, Episerver CMS, Azure, Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Websites:

  • Trumf (Norway’s largest loyalty program)
  • MENY (Prominent online store)
  • KIWI and Joker (Websites with different applications like “Find stores”, “Recipes” and “Online stores”).
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Results

Forte Digital has contributed to improving NorgesGruppen's digital service platform by optimizing the way the company works with digital services. Today, they can take advantage of all the diverse data sources, to offer common components more rapidly across different brand chains and companies in order to develop services in a fast manner. Nevertheless, the company has changed its structure regarding strategic processes, where the current focus is on more frequent and iterative product development processes. This has resulted in increased and more continuous customer-oriented processes.

Moreover, Forte Digital has been involved in the design and development process for a vast range of concepts and solutions, including the loyalty program Trumf and Meny E-commerce. This also applies to other digital services that will be launched in the near future. From the beginning, it became clear that the great amount of customer data needed to be utilized in better and more efficient ways, to build real value and relevance. This has resulted in data that can facilitate new mobile applications, website and e-commerce solutions for NorgesGruppen in the future.

Success factors

Hypothesis-driven and customer-oriented development: All new initiatives have been through an initial hypothesis-driven phase. Forte Digital has alongside NorgesGruppen targeted the most important theories, assumptions and risks. Subsequently, various qualitative and quantitative methods have been tested out to validate needs, expectations and interest, and the general business potential, respectively.

Agile working method and multidisciplinary team: Forte Digital has experienced the value of working in multidisciplinary teams and with a specific working method, based on the project and its objectives. With the complexity and overall goals surrounding this project, it has been a natural gateway to pursue the different designers, developers and project managers at Forte Digital during the work within NorgesGruppen thus far.

Innovative and digital platform with flexible architecture: Practical and functional architectural design is vital for an effective structure. Forte Digital and NorgesGruppen examined the benefits, as it facilitated a focus towards more personalized and relevant digital services. The different teams work closely with a large technology stack to further develop the architecture and other common components to create the best digital service platform for NorgesGruppen as a whole.