Even when working for Fortnum & Mason, Sarah Wilkinson is blown away by the heritage department store’s attention to product provenance, brand authenticity and devotion to customer care.

Wilkinson joined F&M two years ago as director of online, having previously worked for luxury fashion house Jimmy Choo.

“It’s not until you come here that you realize just how much goes into the creation of our products and how much dedication to quality there is”, she notes.

F&M’s buying team runs “brilliant” sessions that guide the wider business through new product launches, explaining the thinking behind each brand, ingredient and supplier choice. This broader view of the buying process can then feed into richer product storytelling online.

Offering customers an immersive experience online is key to the 320-year-old retailer, as they try to emulate the feeling of visiting the historic 181 Piccadilly flagship location.

Wilkinson explains: “The store is a bit of a shop window. Customers will come to the store, or they’ll go online before they visit, and vice versa. International customers especially come to the store and then go online afterwards.

“We have to keep that experience in synergy with each other. If a customer goes online first they should really feel what we’re all about all, and get excited.”

Work in progress

Ensuring customers from all over the world are excited by shopping through F&M’s dedicated site is a passion project for the retailer, and one that is constantly evolving. When launching anything new, such as Biscuits for Drinks or the birthday hamper, there is always tweaks to be made to ensure the best ecommerce experience.

“When you take time to listen to your customers and understand how they’re moving through the website, that is really insightful for us” says Wilkinson.

Working with an agency, F&M can identify any sticking point on the site. While the team may have worked extremely hard on an animation of dancing Cherrilossus biscuits, sometimes it is simply about ensuring customers can find what they want quickly.

“We had the immersive experiences at the top, and we just found that actually some customers just wanted to get stuck in straight away” she stresses.

“Whilst we wanted to keep the animation, keep the fun, we just moved some of the commercial pieces to the top, made it easier for customers. We try and launch something, and we don’t just publish it, we then revisit it, rethink it and reoptimise it.”

This has never been more important with changing customers expectations, and the dynamic way shoppers are now interacting with the site.

“Customers are already starting to use our chat bot for conversational search. They want a conversational map in the way that they might order afternoon tea.”

Wilkinson is exploring a solution that would enable customers shopping for a special occasion to have that dialogue with a bot suggesting a certain type of tea. Or asking: “Have you thought about what kind of scones you would like? Would you like jam? What kind of bubbles would you like?”.

With the buzz around agentic commerce and AI-powered shoppers, Wilkinson is considering how these tools will impact’s Fortnums discoverability. For now she is simply asking: “How do we show up properly in those platforms? What does that mean in the future, when customers will want to check out with an agent, as opposed to necessarily come to a website? What does that look like?”.

While there is a lot of unanswered questions and “the game is changing”, Wilkinson recognises an opportunity around gifting: “People will start using LLMs for what I give my mum, or it’s my friend’s 40th birthday? It’s those terms that we want to make sure you show up for.”

Voice search is another area of transformation for the retailer, but Wilkinson stresses, no matter the technological advances it is simply “about just having the foundations right” and “what makes sense” for their business.

“We’ve worked really hard to make sure that our customer service is impeccable, and in the last year had a lot of time and researching to make sure that those experiences are exceptional. Ultimately, it’s getting that right in the first place.”

Summer peaks and perks

Delivering those exceptional experiences is never more important that during the Golden Quarter of the retail calendar. However, F&M are beginning to experience “mini peaks”. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter have resulted in demand spikes for the brand.

For a retailer that has “dedicated a lot of time to thinking about how we support customers all year round”, a new summer peak is “fascinating”.

“We’ve got the most amazing picnic items: blankets, baskets and flasks, and this amazing array of picnic bits and pieces. People love them. Our summer campaign is taking off now, and actually we’re seeing people starting to think about us during the summer period as well, which is amazing” she notes.

Although, advert calendars have already been discussed in early July.

Acquiring customers through out the year is a challenge for any retailer, even one with such history. And retaining those customers has been another opportunity to listen. Wilkinson explains: “Friends of Fortnum is our loyalty programme, and what the team did with that is really fascinating.

“They spent so much time ahead of launching it talking to customers, making sure they understood what customers were looking for from the loyalty programme. What we delivered was aligned with what people actually wanted. Then they subsequently took time once they’d launched it to survey customers who had it to understand whether they were enjoying it, so they could make tweaks, so that so everything was really customer first.”

This feedback enables Fortnum to continue to “surprise and delight” shoppers whether in-store or online.

Delivering every time

For in-store shoppers who have picked up too much to carry home, F&M offer a delivery service. This same level of proactive customer experience is mirrored in their ecommerce delivery offering.

“We have a really good relationship with DPD, actually, who deliver all of our parcels. In fact, they were really supportive when we made changes last week to make sure that we had ice in every package.

“If for any reason something goes wrong, our customer service team are trained so well to support customers through any problems that they’ve had, and we have an amazing returns policy. We work as hard as we possibly can to get it right, and if it does go wrong for any reason, then we make sure that we have every system in place to support a customer who maybe hasn’t received their delivery for whatever reason.”

Their customer case team is headed up by a former concierge, giving the team such insight into their customers.

Additionally, TruRating questionnaires on the website provide the team with full visibility of any issues: “We have a daily report that comes from the customer service team that has the number of customers that have called in for any issue. It lists anything that’s come up that day. That makes you proactive.

“In previous roles I wouldn’t necessarily have had that visibility, and so it could have taken some time to flag that there was an issue. Whereas now straight away, if there’s anything, any bug on the website, or anything that’s not working the way it should, we should know it on the day. And we can just address it in the right way,” concludes Wilkinson.

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