Coles Transforms the Digital Retail Experience for Millions of Customers

Coles is one of Australia's largest retailers, operating supermarkets, liquor stores, and online shopping platforms. With approximately 900 stores across Australia and a significant digital presence, Coles serves millions of customers through various channels, including coles.com.au, Coles mobile app and multiple liquor websites.

Recognizing the need to stay competitive in the retail market, Coles Digital embarked on an ambitious digital transformation project. This included merging two websites into one and accelerating deployment processes across multiple digital channels. Coles’ leadership understood that they needed to overcome several challenges in their existing setup.

Patrik Mihailescu, Senior Engineering Manager at Coles Digital, oversees 12 product teams, each responsible for specific parts of their website experience such as checkout, search, homepage, and trolley building. He described their previous deployment process: "A lot of the deployments were monthly. And then you could do some hotfixes on a fortnightly basis. Some (of those deployments) caused a P1 or an outage, or required that we do a rollback."

Monthly deployments by way of complex release processes limited Coles Digital ability to quickly iterate and respond to customer needs. Their release meetings had become time-consuming, involving multiple stakeholders. Mihailescu recalls that “all of a sudden you've got lots of dependencies with lots of different systems, you end up having large release meetings where you have a lot of people. They're very expensive.”

Coles Digital deployments had become increasingly complex. The team was running deployments in the early hours of the morning and sometimes having to do rollbacks. Mihailescu notes that “it was very expensive to do deployments… in terms of people and manpower. And the margin of error was too high.”

Mihailescu’s team was also working with a homegrown feature flagging solution that was difficult to maintain and not flexible enough for the needs of multiple teams. He recalls having “half a dozen engineers working on it and maintaining it. But it’s just not scalable. It can’t be scaled across to other teams because there’s an incremental cost there as well.”

Coles Digital recognized that their existing homegrown feature flagging solution couldn't expand to meet their goals. They needed a scalable system for feature management and experimentation; one that could support digital transformation efforts across their diverse technology stack, including React, Java, .NET, iOS, and Android.

After evaluating various options, Coles Digital chose to implement LaunchDarkly. Mihailescu says that their decision was based largely on developer experience in the platform: “It’s got a great developer experience. That was a key point in going with LaunchDarkly; the experience in terms of engineers being able to pick it up and use it.”

Coles Digital started using LaunchDarkly for their coles.com.au website migration project in March of 2022, then progressively expanded their usage to liquor, mobile apps, channel services, and e-commerce layers. Rolling out LaunchDarkly in phases enabled Coles to refine their processes and create best practices as they expanded across the organization. “We did it for the website, which is in React, then we did it within Java for our platform services. We did it within .net as well, and then iOS and Android for our Coles mobile app. Developers were able to pick that up, create what they needed to, and start using it.,” Mihailescu says. “

Mihailescu explains the transformative impact that LaunchDarkly has had on their ability to manage complex customer issues: "It's allowed us to address issues that customers have on mobile. Where a particular customer is not able to use a feature within the app for some reason, we can now quickly respond." By integrating LaunchDarkly with their monitoring tool, Sentry, Coles can swiftly identify and resolve app crashes or compatibility issues. Mihailescu elaborates, "We use LaunchDarkly to switch off a feature if it's causing problems for a specific customer. It might be something related to a particular SDK that's not compatible for that customer." When a customer reports an issue, the team can now provide almost immediate solutions. "That's an amazing customer experience," Mihailescu enthuses. "A customer calls or sends a message to our support team, and we're able to solve it for them in a short amount of time." This rapid response capability has become an important use case for Coles Digital, enabling them to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction even when technical issues arise.

LaunchDarkly’s implementation quickened Coles’ digital transformation and deployments. Coles Digital moved from monthly deployments to multiple deployments per week (with plans to achieve daily deployments in the near future).

Coles Digital can now gradually roll out features and quickly roll back if needed, reducing the risks associated with deployments. They deploy features to a smaller percentage of their audience for testing, giving them extra safety and comfort during deployments. Mihailescu says: “Production deployments are a non-event. There’s not this celebration any more, because (deployments) have become a way of life. From your teams all the way to your execs, it’s just a given that you’re continually deploying.” With their new release cadence, he says, their chief digital officer is encouraging them to: “go faster, go daily!”

LaunchDarkly eliminated the need for complex release meetings and coordination. Mihailescu shared, "We got rid of all of those expensive meetings, no coordination meetings, no one's saying what's going into a release." Streamlining the feature management process and reducing low-value activities for engineers has also improved Coles Digital developer productivity.

Teams can now run frequent, targeted experiments to improve customer experiences. Mihailescu noted, "A great example is search. They use that almost every few days, where they'll use the A/B functionality to test out different search variants."

The Coles Digital team has seen improvement to their customer support center metrics, particularly in a reduction of customer calls to their support center. “Being able to respond (to customer issues) and turn off features has been really key for us,” Mihailescu says. “Given the complex landscape of a lot of systems, sometimes it’s hard to restore service within an acceptable time frame. Being able to switch (some features) off and put up flags to let customers know what services are still available has definitely helped as well.”

Coles Digital made their digital transformation more quickly and efficiently than they initially anticipated. Using LaunchDarkly to decouple deployments from customer releases, improve A/B testing, and run targeted experiments has positioned Coles Digital to innovate faster and deliver better experiences to their customers.

As Coles Digital expands its digital initiatives, LaunchDarkly will continue to play a role in enabling faster, safer, and more impactful innovations for their millions of customers across Australia.