METRO X: The header of Wholesale

Where it all started?

METRO X is an initiative which is the result of Wholesale 360 (video) which focuses on our core wholesale business at the same time expanding it by six subject areas:

• Products
• Services
• Consulting
• Digital Tools
• Equipment
• Marketplace

Where we want to go?

Well, METRO X is our secret recipe or our very own X-factor. Our vision and mission both revolve around our customers. We thrive to become the one stop partner for hospitality, ranging from giant food chains to our amazing local businesses. We push ourselves to make every click from our customers productive and valuable. Weather it being a search for their favourite product or search for some inspiration. Our key focus areas include Content, SEO, User Experience, Experimentation and being data driven.

What does this look like from METRO.digital’s perspective?

METRO X is our potion of elixir that brings customer centricity and Wholesale 360 into play. It was the missing variable in our equation where we lost connection between our digital touchpoints and efficient connection with our customers.

Who is X-Force?

The number of colleagues working together to make METRO X successful is sheer amazing. We have experts from every field, who do not follow standards but set them.

We work with colleagues who are dedicated to find the right content, technology stack, concepts, ideas, and data driven decisions for our customers. Starting from market and technical research to having face to face interviews with our customers. Every feedback and every learning are brought together to create something better than before. Our dedication to support our customers, for them to grow their business is what drives us further. Every day we understand our customers a little more and that encourages us to be the one-stop shop.

Our technical teams are closely working together with our designers to provide the best user experience to our customers. Ease of finding whatever they are looking for, with fast and responsive solution are some of the points dedicated towards a better customer experience.

Anyone who walks with the principles shared above are the esteemed members of X-Force. At METRO.digital, we have colleagues with skill sets varying from development, UX professionals, designers to data scientists who are completely focused on customer experience and pushing the whole solution forward with innovation.

Developer’s perspective

Being a developer in the centre of METRO X is one of the experiences that makes you realise the focus we have on our customers, how we thrive on their success and how far we can go to make our customers succeed in their day-to-day business goals.

For instance, here is what a part of our development process looks like.

We start with validating the technical feasibility of designs which once again are based on data in the first place, then we move towards A/B testing for validating the hypothesis of different design variants, then we focus on a bug free SEO ready development which is capable of providing easy to find (SEO ready), fast, smooth and seamless user experience to our customers, post-delivery of the same we continuously monitor KPIs of the feature, once we have enough data we decide if we are good to go with the existing version or we need to iterate over it and the whole cycle repeats again.

The most amazing part of this cycle is how fast it gets executed and it is continuously ongoing for either new development or iterating over the existing one. We are Agile and our software development lifecycle reflects the same.

Our development teams are solely responsible for end-to-end execution, from bug-free development of fast and smooth applications, maintaining highly available high-performing infrastructure to measuring the KPIs of the same.

We also focus on being more efficient by introducing latest technologies in our stack across the board. Either it being cloud based infrastructure or the introduction of our own custom web components via a web service. Cloud based infrastructure provides us highly available infrastructure to our applications with the possibility to scale nearly instantly to provide smooth and fast user experience to our customers. Our custom web components via web service help various solutions achieve seamless user journeys while avoiding the repetitive development effort of the same feature.

These are just few of the weaponry in arsenal of X-Force.

Is it a revolution?

As Edward Everett Hale quoted “Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress and working together is a success!”

Yes, it very much is. Looking at data over the period of past many years, we can instantly observe that we were doing something well and something not (so Human, right?). But it is not about what happened in past, it indeed is about future. Not our future alone, but our customer’s as well. Just like in a technical implementation Logic supersedes Emotions, in real world data supersedes choices/decisions. We had to not just focus more on data but thrive on it. And this very well was not a solo show. It was about everyone revolving around our customers. We did not just come together to create something better to the best of standards for our customers, but we kept it together and we are working together in a way we have never seen before always keeping our main goal in sight: to make Wholesale 360 reality.

Fruits of METRO X

Seamless user journeys, faster prototyping and data driven decisions are some of the fruits of METRO X and it is going to be a huge part of METRO.digital now more than before.

If you want to check out some of our seamless user journeys, don’t forget to visit METRO DE, MAKRO NL and MAKRO ES. And as we all know it is just the beginning!