UK retailer Wilko taps Virtualstock platform to reduce ‘where is my order?’ calls to its contact centre
As part of its digital acceleration strategy, Wilko has gone live on Virtualstock’s marketplace and drop ship platform.
“We’re delighted with what we’ve been able to achieve with Virtualstock,” says Ben Exall, Digital Director at Wilko, a British high street chain which sells homewares and household goods.
“We know this will result in a reduction in ‘where is my order?’ calls to the contact centre through improved clarity of the orders on their journey to the customer. We can now also better track stock levels with greater visibility in the platform.”
Click and Collect
Earlier this year, Wilko rolled out a Click and Collect service to its 400+ stores.
Online purchases can be collected from stores in as little as three hours, at no extra charge.
This is an extension of a service that the retailer began offering from approximately 70 locations last year.
In a LinkedIn post, Simon Reeve, Head of Solution Delivery and Software Engineering at Wilko, said: “I’m hugely proud of the cross functional team here at Wilko that has recently brought Click and Collect to all of our 400+ stores, resulting in a great new way to shop and some terrific feedback from our customers and team members.”
Reeve noted that delivery went from sticky Post-Its to production launch in about seven months. “That short timescale belies the huge complexity of the challenge.”
He added: “For the Wilko technology team this involved unpicking lots of legacy tech; implementing the spine of a new tech stack based on MACH principles and composable architecture; taking our first steps into CI/CD and DevOps with UST; implementing a new data fabric with Cinchy; integrating OMS capability with Blue Yonder; and much more besides.”
The project involved Wilko shifting its thinking from e-commerce to omnichannel, and from project centric to product centric delivery.
Reeve concluded: “Still lots more to do on all of the above, and as a technology team we're excited to be pushing on and supporting our great business in accelerating our omnichannel transformation.”
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