The Vitamin Shoppe Embraces Digital Transformation for Enhanced Customer Journeys
The Vitamin Shoppe is strategically striving to elevate its customer experience, using tech to create a more personal omnichannel shopping experience that the company hopes will strengthen consumer loyalties.
The recent rollout with Jumpmind’s tech marks a significant milestone for the organization, having completed the new point-of-sale (POS) system alongside the launch of a fully revamped website. This dual deployment not only modernizes the infrastructure but also integrates a new omnichannel promotion tool, requiring careful management of interdependencies across projects.
This initiative implements Jumpmind’s cloud-native, mobile-first POS solution, Jumpmind Commerce, alongside Jumpmind Promote for unified promotions across both online and physical stores. The upgrade, which began in June 2024, will enhance customer and associate experiences in nearly 700 stores, including Super Supplements locations, as well as on vitaminshoppe.com, by the end of October.
For Scott Devlin, Chief Information Officer at The Vitamin Shoppe, the company’s move to omnichannel has been in the works for many years.
“Our backend customer database actually had two versions, one for stores and one for the website, so that’s not very omnichannel,” Devlin told PYMNTS. “We were just looking at buy online, pickup in store, at that time. We’ve been on a pretty aggressive journey to become omnichannel. When people are going to go shop for their vitamins, they’ve got choices, so for us, it’s about creating the best customer experience. And a big part of that is frictionless shopping and letting the customer shop where, how and when they want. From our perspective, the strategy is going to be more around how can we collect more data from the customer to better serve them and show them that we’re going to provide value in exchange for it, and then that will allow us to better serve them and develop them into more loyal customers.”
The motivation behind the upgrade included addressing pain points associated with legacy hardware and enhancing the overall customer experience, Devlin noted. The company has been on a journey toward omnichannel retailing for several years, evolving from a fragmented customer database to a more integrated system that supports various shopping options, including curbside pickup and same-day shipping.
“We had legacy hardware: pin pads were beyond end of life and the pin pads were actually, as of March of next year with PCI 4.0, they were going to be unusable,” Devlin explained. “If we did nothing, there was going to have to be a hardware replacement project. So, that was part of it. I’ve been here for eight years now and we were starting to really get into the omnichannel world when I first got here. One of the key factors that we were looking for … was what platform will give us the agility and the flexibility to be able to integrate these omnichannel functions in a similar way that the website can.”
To ensure a smooth transition, The Vitamin Shoppe emphasized collaboration with store teams throughout the implementation process. The simplicity and usability of the new platform are notable, Devlin explained.
“We sat with that group for requirements for testing, for creating the training, the change management and they were a great sounding board,” Devlin said. “They facilitated the process and we asked about training, they said, ‘they don’t need training. It’s just easy to use.’ The reality is, the first time I saw it in our office, I was able to walk up and do a full transaction myself without anybody saying a word. It was pretty easy. On the other side, I would say on the website there’s probably internally there’s going to be more change management because we’re moving from the legacy monolith to a fully composable website with a lot of new capabilities.”
Another aspect of The Vitamin Shoppe’s initiative is the concept of hybrid checkout. This system combines traditional and self-service methods, allowing customers to interact with digital interfaces while also engaging with staff, making the checkout process more interactive, Devlin noted.
“In every one of our stores you’ve got one fixed station which is a new, modern, sleek touchscreen,” Devlin explained. “And that’s the associate facing side. But for those fixed stations, there’s also an iPad mini that the customer sees and can interact with. So that’s the hybrid. And now you can both participate as opposed to, I guess a legacy where you know, all you’re doing is handing over your credit card or your cash. So that’s exciting. Then we have two mobile devices in every store. Mobile devices that are also registers, they don’t have that customer facing display, but those are also situations where you can point it toward the customer.”
Devlin added: “What we’ve done just out of the gate to scratch the surface on the capabilities of this customer interaction is before where a customer can tap into their name, customer can self-identify. They can type in their name or phone number, which wasn’t the case before. They can then click into their loyalty accounts to see their points and create an award if they have enough points and they choose to do so. So that’s a big step and it’s customers seeing the information right in their face they haven’t been able to see before. Personalize the experience and just make it richer. That’s really where I see the potential with hybrid checkout.”
In addition to these enhancements, the company is also focusing on its subscription services.
“We have a big subscription business, an important subscription business,” Devlin explained. “And our Health Enthusiasts ask customers if they want it put into auto delivery. A lot of times they’ll say yes, but to help, our folks will say, ‘you can get 10% off today.’ And on recurring deliveries, we say ‘this product’s available for auto delivery and you’ll save $4.50 today and on every subsequent order.’ We’re still dealing in anecdotal data from our stores, but they’re pretty good at this. They tell us that they’re getting a lot more yeses because customers want to save those dollars today.”
This approach not only emphasizes immediate savings, but also enriches the customer experience in-store.
“Our stores are our strategic differentiator because of the people there,” Devlin added. “The information you can get from those stores is tremendous. What can we do to help the customer and the stores with data that they might not have at the tip of their fingers? I think that’s where it is. It’s an education. It’s pointing them to a blog post. It’s telling them that you’re only $10 away from the next loyalty tier. It’s a product recommendation that you might see online but might not be in the store. And let’s show that to both our Health Enthusiast and the customer.”
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