Meet Santo George. As a Digital Product Manager, Santo, alongside the Digital Platforms Business, is transforming traditional shopping at Woolworths with a focus on innovation. And not just innovation for the sake of it, Santo’s key inspiration is to offer customers better experiences. Santo is part of a team that began reinventing the in-store mode of the Woolworths app to bring in one-to-one Everyday Rewards offers, clearer wayfinding and personalised specials.

“We redesigned that whole home page and built a bunch of digital tools, and the Voice Product Finder is the most recent one of those tools that we delivered,” he says.

The Voice Product Finder (VPF) allows customers to walk into a Woolworths store, open the app and speak into their phone to find items they need. 
 

The VPF is also capable of recognising multiple languages, making the shopping experience more accessible to a diverse range of shoppers. “My main aim is always to bring the best of the digital world into that physical experience,” says Santo. “It’s like an ultimate shopping companion for me.”

Santo is also part of a team that helped produce wayfinding tools for the Woolworths app. It’s capable of putting a product onto a virtual in-store map and shows the customer a path to locate it, down to the specific location on the shelf.

For Santo, seeing these tools in action is where the magic happens. “It's not just about developing new technology,” he explains. “Speaking to customers is the number one thing we like to do. We've surveyed customers and we had a lot of ideas come our way”. 

Santo says he is excited by the future and motivated by the prospect of using technology to build tools that don’t just serve customer needs today, but anticipate the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. 

“I think we're currently seeing this convergence of the digital and physical worlds,” says Santo. “These different tools have the best of the digital world and allow customers to solve real-world physical problems.”

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