At H-E-B, we understand that it’s not the best customer experience to be bombarded with notifications constantly. That’s why we wanted to change that for the H-E-B app. We made it easier for our customers to choose what notifications they get and when – proverbially, putting the ball back in the court of our customers so they define their own experience.

The notifications our customers want when they want them

To ensure we’re meeting our customers’ needs, we’ve started rolling out push notifications and communication preferences to a portion of our customers. By the end of the summer, every user of the H-E-B app can expect to have access to these new features.

Push notifications, with the addition of communication preferences, give the power to the customer — with this update, they’ll get to choose what they want to receive and when. For curbside or delivery updates, they can easily choose between a push notification directly from the app, a text message, or both. For marketing and promotional emails, they can choose which ones they want to subscribe to. If they’re not interested in promotional emails, they can keep the communication they receive from us strictly order-related — it’s tailored to them.

Build it, and they will stay

Many of the tools and tech we use to facilitate an engaging in-app experience for our customers is built in-house and requires lots of iterating and collaboration with other digital teams. This project was no different. Making this work seamlessly wasn’t cut and dry. The challenge our teams had to overcome was consolidating the number of services responsible for sending messages— to a singular platform that could do it all. Our solution was building CCS2 (Customer Communication Services) which was a platform composted of microservices

that allowed us to process order updates easily, match to message templates, and send out transactional communications (like those that notified of an order being ready to pick up, etc.)

Additionally, we created a service that allows us to easily save customer selections when it comes to how they choose to be communicated with — and that includes marketing emails. Suppose a customer has already decided to opt-out of promotional emails in the past, that will reflect in the new system. They don’t need to tell us twice!

The next phase

But it doesn’t stop here! We have big plans for using these notifications to get the most out of Curbside pickup. Eventually, customers will be able to let us know when they’re on their way to the store and will be able to simply tap the push notification to check-in at the curb when they’ve arrived. We’re excited to launch this new update to our app and give our customers options over when and how they hear from us.

This new update is just another step in supporting the digital experience of “My H-E-B.”