M&S Keeps Customers Informed During the Pandemic and Beyond with Uberall

Overview

One of the UK’s most iconic retailers, M&S serves 31 million customers throughout the UK across a range of businesses: from everyday style on M&S.com, to the very best prawn sandwiches at convenience M&S Simply Food locations.

This year, the M&S brand tapped into Uberall, the hybrid customer experience platform, to find new ways to help customers shop with confidence during the various phases of the pandemic.

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The Challenge

M&S began working with Uberall in 2018 with the goal of cleaning up the listings data for all its 1,000 stores. This was particularly challenging because M&S operates as a family of accountable businesses and with brands such as M&S Simply Food, M&S Outlet and more recently M&S products within Ocado.

Each brand operates as an independent location on Google Business Profile, but sometimes with inconsistent information. This meant cleaning up the listings data for 1,000 locations, ensuring each one was up-to-date, complete and consistent.

The Solution

During the pandemic, M&S has been using technology to find new ways to help customers shop with confidence. Part of this included utilising Uberall Listings to make it easier for new and existing customers to find extensive, up-to-date information (such as services available in-store) on M&S’s 1,000 stores, regardless of which search platform they use – from Google to Apple Maps.

With Listings, M&S’s data is updated instantly and in real time, ensuring customers can continue to be confident they’ll find up to date info when they search online – most crucially opening hours.  

The Results

Over the summer of 2020, M&S extended its use of the visual tool on Uberall CoreX. This meant sharing their customer Covid-19 guidelines through multiple online channels – helping improve customer awareness of measures in place and steps they need to take.

For example, all M&S listings noted that masks are to be worn in M&S stores. The team also ensured more relevant imagery was used reflecting changing customer trends – for example using wellness & home pics.

This has increased customer engagement on Google – with an increase of customers viewing M&S imagery on average from 35,000 per day to 235,000 per day within just four weeks.