The digital tools revolutionizing the Dollar General shopping experience
Listening to customers sparks ongoing tech innovation for the company’s dedicated digital products team.
With more than 17,600 locations across the United States, Dollar General is one of the most easily accessible retail stores in the country. (In fact, approximately 75% of Americans live within five miles of a Dollar General). Despite its size, however, the company carefully curates its store offerings based on a number of factors, including customer feedback.
To better serve its various communities, DG has created a portfolio of store formats, including, among others, DGX (a smaller, specially tailored store for those visiting and living in metropolitan areas), DG Plus (a traditional store that includes additional coolers and larger square footage), and DG Market (an expanded store that offers fresh meats, produce, and more). And today, Dollar General’s service-driven, localized shopping experience is evolving even further thanks to digital technologies.
“Across our organization, there is an unrelenting commitment to make our customers’ lives easier,” says Emily Taylor, chief merchandising officer at Dollar General, who leads strategy and execution of the company’s merchandising, marketing, global sourcing, merchandise operations, and in-store digital experience efforts. “Listening to our customers not only allows us to meet their current needs, but also gives us insight as to how we can meet those needs as they change. Digital solutions and innovations are often the best way for us to achieve the goal of saving our customers time and money.”
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to Sarah Gernux on how the pandemic changed DG's digital road map.
PUTTING THE CUSTOMER IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT
But how does DG know what its customers are thinking? Some customer feedback comes directly from the field. For example, after Dollar General launched DG GO!, a mobile app that enables customers to scan product barcodes and check out, team members noticed something interesting. Many customers who were using the app weren’t completing purchases on their phones. Instead, they were repurposing the scanning functionality to keep a running tally of exactly how much they were spending.
This “ah-ha” moment led to the creation of Cart Calculator, a new DG app feature that allows customers to scan items as they shop, monitor their total costs (including localized tax calculations), and avoid any surprises at checkout. The app can also alert customers if a comparable item from DG’s private brands may be on sale for a lesser cost or if an applicable digital coupon offer is available, ensuring that no savings are left on the table.
Today, Cart Calculator is available in more than 16,000 stores nationwide and boasts hundreds of thousands of users every month. DG’s innovation doesn’t stop there. Another evolution of the DG app, Shopping List, was developed to help customers pre-plan visits by enabling them to search and add products to their shopping lists before going to the store. And the response to these tools has been overwhelmingly positive; customers report that they love the simplicity and accessibility of the apps—and the fact that they actually do save money by using them.
This feedback, as well as data provided by various analytics tools—which capture in-app actions and engagement to ensure the customer experience is running smoothly—continues to inspire the company’s digital products team as they work to develop a roadmap for app updates and build new products and features to address ever-evolving customer needs.
Across our organization, there is an unrelenting commitment to make our customers’ lives easier.”
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—Emily Taylor, Chief Merchandising Officer at Dollar General
“We utilize these unique insights—among others—when validating new functionality we want to introduce into the app,” says Sarah Gernux, Dollar General’s senior manager of digital products. “Our designers also do an incredible job prototyping features and getting them tested with customers before we ever write one line of code, so we get all that feedback ahead of time.”
For Taylor, Gernux, and the entire team, it comes down to making sure that Dollar General is available for customers digitally and helps them purchase the products that they want and need. “When we look at Cart Calculator and what it offers, we’ve built an app that is frictionless and saves our customer time and money. Those are two pillars that Dollar General stands on, and that’s our litmus test for any project and any feature that we embark on as a digital team,” says Gernux.
INNOVATING—AND SERVING CUSTOMERS—THROUGH CRISIS
As the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people shop, the capacity for agile, responsive innovation became more critical than ever, and Dollar General’s integrated teams rose to the challenge. In January 2020, DG Pickup—a buy online/pickup in store feature within the DG app—was being piloted in roughly 30 stores. But once social distancing orders were enacted and contactless shopping became a necessity, Dollar General acted at lightning speed, rapidly scaling the program and adding the functionality to approximately 16,000 additional stores within the year.
For Dollar General, digital tools such as DG Pickup and Cart Calculator are not simply technology for technology’s sake. Rather, they’re grounded in real customer solutions, whether that’s saving money, making shopping trips faster and easier, or helping customers weather a global health crisis.
“Based on customer feedback, we know that accessibility, speed, and assortment of goods are significant priorities,” says Taylor. “The evolution of the DG app is a perfect example of listening to customer needs and demonstrating how we can achieve our mission of serving others as we evolve to meet the demands of the digital future. We will continue to allow our customers to frame their shopping experience through the many offerings we provide—ensuring that the experience is simple, fast, fun, and easier on their wallets because we know that every day, our team helps to improve the lives of customers. From small towns to large cities across the country, our stores are providing the value and convenience that American families need, want, and rely on.”
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