Tesco customers have been told they can expect more hi-tech offerings following the successful launch of its budget tablet last week.
The development of the supermarket’s own-brand tablet, Hudl, has been received well, with 35,000 units sold in its first two days on sale.
This is just a taste of things to come, though, as Tesco aims to deliver the ‘shopping experience of the future’, Matt Atkinson, CMO, Tesco, explained to CBR.
"We have lots of technological developments planned," he said. "We have a product development roadmap for this tablet so expect more. This is our first one. We aim to improve things and offer new products.
"We’ve obviously got a whole range of app developments going on, from mobile wallets to new services that will go on these devices, to exploring how we make a difference to in-store technology – things like endless isles, touchscreens, making the most of all of that technology.
"We’ve got a very rich development pipeline. A lot of it we’re trialling and testing to see if it does work. Our point was to start, see how we get on and if it goes really well then we’ll continue to innovate."
"At our best we’re an innovative customer champion and increasingly that’s been about trying to make a difference to the connected customer."
Tesco is well placed to do that, according to Atkinson. "We’ve got data, physical assets, a home delivery network and a range of things that we can put together to make a difference to the way in which customers are increasingly shopping.
"Underneath that, you’ve got to build a technology infrastructure that enables you to serve the customers across platforms and devices. Our approach to that is to make sure that all of our data is one place and then create services that sit on that data.
"A service might be a coupon service. That might sound simple but you need a multi-channel coupon service so we can recognise a customer and they can use that coupon wherever, whenever, however they want. On top of the services we aim to create great experiences – apps that sit on these services – whether it’s a meal planner or intelligent search.
"With technology we can make shopping easy, seamless and make life a bit better."
