After the first year with its own mobile order and pay app, UK-based coffee shop Caffè Nero is harvesting many benefits from the new sales channel. As the following Essential Retail article describes, the mobile app brings a customized flavor to its customer relationship efforts.
It’s been a year since Caffè Nero launched its mobile payments and loyalty app, and it says the technology has boosted customer engagement levels over the last 12 months, helping drive sales and consumer retention.
Simplicity and convenience were the key goals for the UK coffee chain when it planned how the app would look and function. There was also a desire to produce an app that was unique to the business, not a white-labelled version of another organisation’s technology.
That has been achieved through a partnership with Yoyo Wallet, which brought the mobile app to life in April 2017 as a way of digitising the hospitality brand’s long-running paper-based stamp card.
Before the app was launched, the only thing the organisation could clearly track about its target market was how frequently customers were entering the store via Wi-Fi monitoring. There was nothing else the business could confidently say it knew about customers, which stemmed the flow of targeted communications.
Now, thanks to an embedded transaction API, customer basket data can be accessed and analysed by the brand, revealing what users are buying and when. Yoyo says with these tokenised payments shopper data is kept secure, but Caffè Nero’s access to the information means it can run promotions to support a certain store, segment of customers, or an individual product.
James Flett, partnerships manager at Caffè Nero, who was on stage at this year’s RBTE to inform event delegates about the project, said: “This is the first time that we’ve had access to basket-level information – we can now identify, recognise and have a relationship with the customer.”
Successful mobile apps are highly correlated to the degree of integrated features that are built into the software. When merchants combine a seamless payment, loyalty programs, and customized marketing offers, they see high engagement from customers who spend more and visit frequently. Additionally, as shown by the Caffè Nero example, rich customer intelligence comes through so that the business can better segment their market and drive even higher sales.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
