Written By Andy Gamble, Chief Information Officer

08 July, 2022

At Currys, we exist to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. Central to that vision, is helping our customers discover and choose the tech they want and need, which is why we’re transforming to become a world class, digital-first, retailer.

Building upon our infrastructure of over 300 brick-and-mortar stores in the UK and Ireland, our digital transformation is rooted in maximising our omnichannel model to give our customers an unrivalled experience, augmented by technology but enabled by the best people.

Over the last three years, 80% of UK households have shopped with Currys and, on average, we serve over 8.5 million customers a week across our stores and online, with 60% of those preferring to shop across multiple channels. Our job is to make it simple for them to do this, which is why Easy to Shop is one of our three strategic priorities, alongside creating Customers for Life and developing Capable and Committed Colleagues.

Our omnichannel transformation is making it easier for customers to shop, by giving each and every one of them access to both our online and in-store offer, providing an unrivalled range and delivering a better experience than they could get from a single, standalone channel. Central to this transformation, is the delivery of streamlined, frictionless, customer experiences, powered by a single, 360-degree connected view of every customer.

We have recognised the need to create an integrated and connected ecosystem that brings together the online and in-store journeys in a meaningful way. We are now leveraging data and best-in-class technology to give customers the greatest possible experience, fuelled by enriched recommendations, personalisation and a strong and growing online business. All of which supports our drive to create customers who keep on coming back, accelerating our change from a business that historically sold boxes to anonymous customers, to one that creates valuable customer relationships for life.

Achieving this has and will continue to be no mean feat, especially as the historic digital experience wasn’t as joined up as we wanted. Our legacy infrastructure had confusing online journeys across multiple brands. And we needed to know more about our customers to help us make the right decisions and give them a more personalised shopping experience. Our colleagues didn’t have the tools to provide a consistent quality of service, as we moved more towards a more omnichannel model and our website needed investment to meet current and future demand.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​We also needed to bring the thing that customers value most about our stores – help - to life digitally.

Today, the hardest yards of our transformation are behind us. The last year has seen a step change in our consumer websites, with a radically easier and richer online customer experience now live. By bringing customer service cases from across channels into a single view, we are aligning thousands of customer journeys to speed up resolution times and enhance customer satisfaction. We now have strong foundation in place - but there is more value to unlock.

Looking ahead, we will give our customers fewer reasons to shop elsewhere. And, while we have significantly expanded our customer base, we remain committed to getting to know our customers better through data. This will allow us to talk to them more often, provide a deeper, more personalised level of customer service, drive more frequent purchases and loyalty and grow the uptake of our wider Services offer.

We’ll arm our colleagues with a richness of information not previously seen, put amazing tech in their hands and enable them to have more meaningful interactions with customers – after all, our people are our magic ingredient.

We’ve come a long way - but as you will see in the video below, we are only just getting started.