S Group is Finland’s biggest grocery store chain. Their crown jewel – Alepa – takes pride in being the official corner store of local communities. Despite this, all Alepa’s and their selections, have traditionally been almost identical. This is not a modern way in a world that is filled with highly personalized services.

Alepa offers most day-to-day grocery products, but the stores are unable to stock every imaginable product in their selection and the absence of single missing product (i.e. the favoured coffee) could result in losing the customer to other local stores.

Alepa's competitor K-market was viewed more agile when it came to match the store selection to customers local needs due to the K Market store owners being individual entrepreneurs. Thus Alepa was behind in two main brand attributes: "The selection fits my needs" and "I am able to influence store selection". This was a clear threat for Alepa's market share.

We needed solution that would help Alepa to serve its customers better and have the feeling of personalized service, leap to #1 position in the key image metrics and drive sales.

To overcome the business challenge, we deep dived in customer behaviour and the nature of Finns. The sales and loyalty data did not give full answers on how to customise selection on each neighbourhood. Data only showed what people had bought, not what they would and want to buy. We had to look beyond data.

To fix the selection related brand image Alepa had started taking product wishes from customers in stores. These handwritten wishes were indefinite and time consuming.

To build something new and different, we gathered a multi-discipline workshops of S Group professionals from creative designers to coders and marketing people to store selection professionals. Iterative outcome was world’s first logistics and selection integrated chatbot. We realised that we could use S-Groups product database, logistics system and a 3rd party chatbot platform by tying them all together via APIs.

All the pieces of puzzle to hack the unique breakthrough idea had been on the table, but until the crystallising the challenge we were not able to see it. 12 months later from the idea the Chatbot was live.

“Alepa Block Wishes” -chatbot is a hyperlocal digital initiative like no other. With the help of a chatbot, customers could request their favorite products to be added on the shelves of their local Alepa straight from their mobile phones via an app Finns were using for personal messaging already.

Chatbot was integrated fully to all S Group stock level product data and shop locations. Bot searched matching product to customers wishes from S Group databases using meta data and returned best matching products within milliseconds to the chat.

A big part of the solution was redesigning logistics and production-line turnaround to be utilized with the Block Wish chatbot. We used existing technologies and API's to enhance the customer satisfaction and were able to fulfill majority of the wishes in mere 48 hours.

- 46 % of people feel they can influence Alepa’s assortment (Alepa +19% since launch of the chatbot, at the same time competing K Market score went down -7%)

- Brand measures sky rocketed:

--- “Selection fits my needs” +12 points;

--- “Alepa actively improves it services” +9 points

- Alepa has received 150 000 product wishes since starting the Block Wish

- 70% of wishes were fulfilled within 48 hours

- In most active neighborhoods up to 25% of Alepa store selection is customized by Block Wishes

- 22% customers have made Block Wish and 56% are about to do so

- “Block Wish” products can demand a higher pricing point than the rest of their product group

- Block Wish started the transformation of Alepa and changed the way Alepa and S-group operate

Alepa (owned by S Group) is a convenience store chain in the Helsinki area, which has about 1,2 million people and eight competing grocery & convenience store chains. Four of those are direct competitors. The toughest battle is fought with K Market.

The key difference is that the K Market and Alepa chains is that K Markets has individual entrepreneurs as store owners, while Alepa is a ’pure’ chain, managed by chain management through store managers.

The brand image handicap for Alepa has been in the ability to tailor the store assortment to customer needs in which K Market has been able to be the market leader with its closer touch to consumers.