Boots CIO reveals the retailer’s tech innovation strategy

After Covid restric­tions had pre­vent­ed his IT depart­ment from vis­it­ing the firm’s stores across the UK and Ire­land for the best part of two years, Richard Cor­bridge urgent­ly need­ed a way to recon­nect the func­tion with the cus­tomer-fac­ing part of Boots. 

“What we hit upon was how we could rein­vig­o­rate that rela­tion­ship as soon as pos­si­ble, rather than let­ting it be a slow burn,” says Cor­bridge, who was pro­mot­ed to CIO from direc­tor of inno­va­tion at Boots UK in August 2020. “I had the idea of pick­ing one day where we would try to vis­it as many stores as we could. We want­ed to see if we could make a big impact quick­ly.”

On 17 March this year, about 200 IT spe­cial­ists duly trav­elled to well over 300 retail out­lets, rang­ing from the flag­ship stores in London’s Covent Gar­den and Sheffield’s Mead­owhall cen­tre all the way down to its small­est cor­ner­shop phar­ma­cies. Their mis­sion: to glean as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble about the biggest tech con­cerns of those on the front line.

To ensure that mem­bers of his team were ful­ly engaged in this wide-rang­ing exer­cise, he encour­aged them to organ­ise their own itin­er­aries and decide which sites they would vis­it. If they so wished, they could use their field trips as a basis for going on to meet friends and rela­tions, for instance.

“Peo­ple could decide wher­ev­er they want­ed to go – and they didn’t feel they had to come up with a rea­son for their choice of des­ti­na­tion,” Cor­bridge says. “We tried to empow­er the team to enjoy the day and get the most out of it for them­selves, which is prob­a­bly why it was so suc­cess­ful.” 

He con­tin­ues: “Our 45,000 col­leagues in the Boots port­fo­lio are see­ing cus­tomers day in, day out. They gain so much insight into what con­sumers are seek­ing from tech­nol­o­gy. On the front line, they know bet­ter than those of us who sit in a tech devel­op­ment lab or at head office about what our cus­tomers real­ly want.”

Cor­bridge feels it’s the role of a CIO to under­stand what the cus­tomers’ require­ments are and then deter­mine the best way to meet those needs. “If we’re want­i­ng to offer them a per­son­alised jour­ney, the only way to do that is to bring tech­nol­o­gy and data togeth­er and then work out how to make that change hap­pen,” he says.

On the day of the vis­its, Cor­bridge also held an open video chat ses­sion in which any­one could update him on IT prob­lems they were expe­ri­enc­ing. More than 650 calls were logged.

Armed with all the new infor­ma­tion, his team swift­ly com­plet­ed a strat­e­gy that was pre­sent­ed to the exec­u­tive team the fol­low­ing after­noon. 

“We put a price tag and a time­frame on it. The next day it was approved as our first store-cen­tric IT strat­e­gy,” Cor­bridge says.

It’s cru­cial for the IT func­tion to use projects such as this to learn about what’s hap­pen­ing on the front line, he stress­es. It should ensure that the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence will be more “excit­ing, invig­o­rat­ing and con­ve­nient” in any Boots out­let, what­ev­er its size. 

Cor­bridge explains: “We’re in the mid­dle of rolling out a huge new net­work capa­bil­i­ty across the whole of the estate. One of the key things we learnt from the day was that we need to do this more quick­ly because stores are real­ly strug­gling with con­nec­tiv­i­ty. When cus­tomers are in stores and can’t get a Wi-Fi con­nec­tion, it’s ham­per­ing their expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Boots has moved its loy­al­ty card on to mobile phones.”

Anoth­er key insight aris­ing from the project was how hard it can be for a mem­ber of staff in a busy store to con­tact the IT helpdesk quick­ly when­ev­er some­thing breaks. It also high­light­ed a wider issue con­cern­ing inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. 

“It was inter­est­ing,” he says. “One of the things we had cre­at­ed about nine months pre­vi­ous­ly was the abil­i­ty for stores to raise a help call by send­ing an email instead of ring­ing some­one up. But staff in more than 80% of our stores hadn’t realised that they could do that. IT’s abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with them is some­thing we real­ly need to think through, so that we get more mes­sages out to them and they under­stand what we’re try­ing to do.”

This aspect is cru­cial to the part that CIOs play in trans­form­ing busi­ness­es, notes Cor­bridge, who adds: “My role is becom­ing more and more about busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion because busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion is becom­ing more and more reliant on tech­nol­o­gy.”

This makes it impor­tant for the CIO to be part of the senior lead­er­ship team – some­thing that he has been at Boots ever since assum­ing the role.

“I don’t see my exper­tise real­ly being about tech­nol­o­gy when I’m sit­ting on the exec­u­tive board,” Cor­bridge says. “I see my exper­tise as being about how to make suc­cess­ful changes hap­pen at pace. As a CIO, you’re lean­ing on your team for the lev­el of tech­no­log­i­cal knowl­edge required. Your own skill is more about con­nect­ing peo­ple and pro­vid­ing the answers to the trans­for­ma­tion ques­tions.”

Build­ing on Boots’ first store-cen­tric IT strat­e­gy, he’s already think­ing about fur­ther projects to sup­port tech inno­va­tion and inform the company’s wider strat­e­gy.

“We’re lucky that our lead­er­ship team real­ly val­ues what tech can do,” Cor­bridge says. “Our man­ag­ing direc­tor [Sebas­t­ian James] has been real­ly clear that IT is an intrin­sic part of the trans­for­ma­tion, so it needs to have a seat on the board and the capa­bil­i­ty to do all the work that’s need­ed.”

The three key strands of Boots’ tech innovation strategy

1. Online

A cen­tral com­po­nent of Boots’ new plan con­cerns “super-scal­ing” the web­site so that it can han­dle much high­er num­bers of users shop­ping at any giv­en time, accord­ing to Cor­bridge. Per­son­al­i­sa­tion is anoth­er impor­tant ele­ment. Once you’ve shopped online at Boots and return to the site, it will know what you’ve bought pre­vi­ous­ly and “how to tai­lor your bas­ket at check­out with offers, so that all the most valu­able things you might think of from Boots are there”.

2. Health­care

The sec­ond strand con­cerns Boots’ abil­i­ty to offer “per­son­alised health­care on the high street”. Cor­bridge says that he’s intent on apply­ing here what the com­pa­ny has learnt from per­son­al­is­ing the retail jour­ney. This includes using tai­lored online con­tent to give cus­tomers access to rel­e­vant med­ical infor­ma­tion such as updates from NHS trusts and Boots phar­ma­cists.

3. Phys­i­cal retail

The third strand focus­es on bring­ing the dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal cus­tomer expe­ri­ences clos­er togeth­er. For instance, cus­tomers who use the Boots app when they are vis­it­ing a bricks-and-mor­tar store will be grant­ed access to new items on their devices.