Tesco has revealed it is currently trialling a new sat-nav application in one of its UK stores that will enable customers to find the items on their shopping lists more easily.
The supermarket giant said that it was testing an Android app for the in-store sat-nav system in the Tesco Extra store in Romford, north-east London, which will calculate the shortest and fastest route to picking up all of the products the user needs.
The information will be displayed on a 3D map of the store using the GPS signal on the user’s smartphone .
Commenting on the benefits of using Google’s Android platform for the app, Tesco said: “We don’t want the app in its current state going into the public app stores. Only Android easily offers the ability to install apps from ‘Unknown Sources’.”
However, it added: “Please note that we won’t be rolling this out to customers in general for a while because we have to think about how useful it’s going to be.”
“The system involves a lot of infrastructure installation in the stores so we need to get all kinds of people involved in thinking about the customer experience. It would be awful if we did all this work but few customers really used it.”
To help with the testing, Tesco said it was looking for volunteers, both customers and employees, who were willing to try out the system on their Android-powered mobiles .
