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Associate Delivery

The background, opportunity, and design solution behind Walmart's innovative last-mile program.

With the Walmart Associate Delivery Program, Walmart store employees can deliver online orders to customers while on their commute back home from the store.

The program is a win-win-win for customers, associates, and the business:

  • Customers can get their packages faster

  • Associates can earn extra money on their way back home

  • The business cuts shipping costs
     

Associates are in full control of their experience. If they don’t want to participate, they don’t have to. If they choose to opt-in, they are provided with a mobile app that allows them to set preferences such as how many packages they can deliver, the size and weight limits of those packages, and which days they want to make deliveries after work. Associates can update these preferences at any time, and the Jet transportation and associate delivery team created a custom algorithm to allocate packages based on minimizing the collective distance associates need to travel off their commute to make a delivery.

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Background

Before Associate Delivery, Walmart.com’s Delivery promise was 4 to 7 days. To be competitive in the e-commerce space, Walmart needed to keep up with the online customer’s expectations.
How could Walmart provide Same-Day Delivery nationwide overnight?
Leveraging Walmart’s footprint and associates seems to be the answer to this question. Walmart employs approximately 1.5 million U.S. associates at more than 5,000 stores and clubs nationwide. In the United States, 90 percent of the population resides within 10 miles of a Walmart store.
Also, Walmart owns the biggest B2B supply chain network in the country, line hauling thousand of trucks from regional distribution centers to the stores every day.

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Opportunity

By building an experience that allows store associates to deliver online packages on their way home, Walmart could cut delivery costs and pass those savings to customers, provide a better and faster delivery experience, and offer an additional perk for associates.
To understand if this was a real opportunity, we interview store associates and ask them about the program.
 

  • Is this something they will be interested in doing?

  • How much will they expect to be paid?

  • What information do they need to know to opt-in for this program?
     

Based on the findings of the user testing sessions, we started to shape the program and the app that associates would use to make deliveries.

The majority of interviewed associates were interested in the program. Associates also expressed that they wanted to have flexibility on when and what to deliver. Not all associates can carry all kinds of packages, have the same amount of space on their cars, or have the same availability every day.
To make this program appealing to associates, we focus on designing features that provided the flexibility they needed.

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Testing

Since this is an experience that is both digital and physical. Using traditional lab user testing wasn’t enough because there is a big part of the experience that happens off the phone (Load packages to the car, drive, deliver packages, etc…)
To solve this, we agree on a speed-to-market approach, prioritizing frequent releases over highly crafted experiences allowing us to test ideas with real users and data in real scenarios and video document the experience for further discussions.

We also designated our office as a Delivery Hub (like if it was a Walmart Store), which allows the product team to make deliveries so we could experience the program first-hand and discover ways to optimize it.

Customer touchpoints

Another positive aspect of the program was that we could control the delivery experience, a touchpoint that is usually void to e-commerce since it relies on the operations procedures of the carriers.
Associate Delivery users were trained on the different ways of delivering a package. They were given a Walmart hat, vest, and encouraged to thank customers for shopping with us. As a result, customer satisfaction and NPS were considerable up on orders delivered through the program.

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