7-Eleven

The marketplace was changing. Store visits were down and franchisees were making less profit than they did five years earlier. The concept of “convenience” had shifted with the proliferation of mobile-first services, and competitors had responded in ways that put 7-Eleven's leadership in the convenience category at risk. Project Phoenix was the response to that reality and the start of a longer journey to redefine convenience for 7-Eleven.

Over the course of a week I personally visited five stores in DFW and observed more than a dozen associates serving several hundred customers. Shadowing employees surfaced the key constraints, user needs and business requirements of both sets of franchisees and their employees.

The research effort was guided by three questions: what do operations look like today, what issues can we anticipate for each new service line of online ordering, and what does a typical shift look like?

Five priorities came out of the store visits:

• The line comes first
• Location drives store planning
• Help make the operation plan work
• Franchisees request reasonable protections
• Improve back-office sales optics

The line begins at the door. It is a misconception that the line starts at the counter — it starts when a customer enters the location, and from that point the associate's behavior adjusts to focus on that person as if they were already in line.

Space planning is needed. There is little to no room to store items for customer arrival, so franchisees need help laying out locations to hold orders in an accessible, fast and effortless way that keeps line flow uninterrupted. “We would need a hot/cold storage area to store the orders. We could have a designated shelf too.”

Visuals are critical. Many store associates are not proficient in English, and product variations are hard to distinguish without an image. A clear visual approach to product matching and identification avoids rework, inefficiency and confusion during fulfillment. “Photos will be important. Many of my staff do not speak that much English.”

The business measured success through T-count lift, share of millennial customers, basket size, franchisee success, and contribution to the 7-Eleven 6-Point Plan. Differentiators named by stakeholders were variety of assortment, 24/7 fresh food, age-restricted items, delivery and regionalization of assortment.

For the app itself, the project team tracked a longer list of metrics — labor expenses, downloads and entry paths, learnability, downtime, gross profit, call-center inquiries, order accuracy and speed — with five marked as MVP success criteria:

• Engagement — new users, returning customers, reorders, sharing and sentiment
• Basket size
• Order acceptance rate
• NPS and System Usability Scale
• Franchisee adoption

Workshop participants built provisional personas from what they already knew about customers, which also exposed what was still unknown. Two of those personas were carried into a provisional journey-mapping exercise: Sam the Sports Fan for delivery and Polly the Professional for pickup.

Stakeholder interviews ran alongside the field work. Two themes repeated: convenience as the North Star — “it's just about convenience, everything we do needs to point to that North Star” — and speed, including tighter sprint coordination between design and development so the two work as one unit rather than two.

A review-card exercise captured how employees and future customers expected to feel about the service. Employees rated it favorably for increased sales, recovered T-counts, ease of learning, raising the bar for POS, shorter lines and being relatively hands off; negatively for being time consuming, confusing, one more task, no benefit to them, slowing them down and misaligned inventory data.

Customers valued ease of use and understanding, and pushed back on unreliable data, being asked for too much, slow payment or checkout and poor user experience.

The plan split into two tracks. Customer: final screener approval, validation recruiting, and validation testing. Employee: ideation session, estimation, and sprint planning.