Revive, Member Rewards, Home Deliveries & Travel Updates
This article will take approximately 5 minutes to read
Published 21 Aug 2020 in Phil's blog
Welcoming our new Travel branches
In early July, we announced the transfer of 16 travel branches from Central England Co-operative to Midcounties. Almost two weeks ago, the branches officially opened, helping us develop our growth in the East of England and take our retail estate to over 70 branches.
In the current circumstances, it’s not been the usual Midcounties welcome, but this is where our remote working and Microsoft Teams software has been excellent. Enabling the travel teams to support our new colleagues and offer a virtual welcome to the society along with the online training programmes to ensure our new colleagues are up to speed.
A thank you to all the Travel and Support team colleagues who have helped the Central England Co-operative Travel branch transfers during this period. I would like to give a warm welcome to our new colleagues at Team Midcounties.
The new branches are:
| Allenton – Derby | Kings Lynn - Norfolk |
| Atherstone – Warwickshire | Lowestoft - Suffolk |
| Beccles – Suffolk | March - Cambridgeshire |
| Castle Donnington – Derby | Market Deeping - Lincolnshire |
| Diss – Norfolk | Oakham - Rutland |
| Erdington – Birmingham | Peterborough |
| Glenfields – Leicestershire | Thetford - Norfolk |
| Ibstock – Leicestershire | Whetstone – Leicestershire |
Revive Strategy Update
I informed you at the end of May about our Revive Strategy that launched in June and continues until the end of September, and I expect many of you have been involved in activities relating to this programme.
Revive is about targeting the key elements that will accelerate both business renewal and business growth and involves adapting business plans to focus on the short-term priorities and opportunities.
Each Group has an individual Revive Plan, collectively contained within the overall Society Plan with the individual action plans focusing on a number of high-quality questions that are addressed by a key activity each with clear and measurable metrics, milestones and individual accountability.
To date over 300 tasks have been completed and all groups are on track to deliver their plans by the end of September. If you click on the link below you will see a mid-term review of the programme that gives you insight into the plans and progress to date.
Our Revive strategy is key to how we best accelerate business growth and trading activity as we recover from the COVID crisis and I will continue to keep you updated of progress. We are working up phase 2 of our Revive Plan which will run from October until the end of January. As we continue to navigate through uncertain times we will retain the focus on trading and keep communicating with colleagues as we have throughout the COVID-19 period. We have also been focussing on the implications of Brexit to the Society and a summary of this is also contained in the revive PowerPoint in the link below.
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- Revive Strategy - Mid-Term Review PowerPoint
Member Rewards Update
Delivering our co-operative difference includes growing our membership base and increasing our trade with members. That means we need to connect more directly with our members and develop meaningful and unique membership rewards.
As part of this, we launched a pilot of Your Co-op Rewards last week in the Chipping Norton and Walsall areas. One-third of our overall trade is with our membership today and we aim to increase this to over half by 2025. It works through an app. Members collect digital stamps when they spend on food and utilities enabling unique rewards such as discounts on travel and food treats.
Over the last two weeks we have been inviting our pilot members to download our new Your Co-op Rewards app. On the app they will see their stamps and the rewards they can earn – but they also see offers to encourage them to shop more in our food and travel business. We have a whole range of offers tailored to different groups of members and all are designed to encourage them to shop with us and use more of our businesses.
Each day someone in our pilot stores has won their shopping for free. On Wednesday we had a lovely couple win the prize in Chipping Norton. They always shop with us and spend over £100, today they had their £108 shop for free. They couldn't believe it when they found out they had won their shopping free and gone away very happy. A great result for our loyal members!
So far, we have 750 members who have downloaded the app - around 5% of our pilot members. The company we are working with provide loyalty expertise worldwide and tell us that 5% at this stage is an excellent result. They seem to be making good use of it – those who downloaded it in the last week have already opened it 2-3 times. So it looks as if they find it relevant and worth coming back to. As the project progresses, the numbers will grow through our marketing communications and store colleagues.
Your Co-op Rewards is making it much easier to sign up new members based on store colleague feedback and this is an area we want to concentrate on over the coming weeks. Of course, there have been a few teething problems but as a pilot, the initial feedback from members and stores is very positive.
We will continue to develop the member proposition so that it really engages our members and gives them meaningful benefits on top of their share of profits. For more information on the pilot click here.
Reaching 70,000 Home Deliveries
You may have seen on Monday that we announced we’ve now provided over 70,000 Home Deliveries of essential food supplies to the most vulnerable in our communities. I would like to pass on my congratulations and thanks to all of the colleagues and volunteers that have worked tirelessly to make this happen, supporting the most at need across our trading areas.
To find out more click here.
As always, let me have your thoughts by commenting below.