Transforming digital capabilities for one of the UK’s best loved food and coffee chains

How can we design and launch multiple digital initiatives globally and in quick succession?

Our client, one of the UK’s best loved food and coffee chains, a stalwart for office workers countrywide, had been hit especially hard by the pandemic. Its global leadership team was adopting a ‘Digitise or Die’ strategy to kickstart business as the world adapted to ‘new normal’ working patterns. To boost growth, they wanted to develop global digital capabilities from the ground up. With ambitious targets in mind – an industry-first coffee subscription, Click & Collect, customer accounts, a new mobile app and loyalty programme, and a tight timeframe with minimal existing digital capability, this was a huge challenge, especially amidst a challenging global economic environment.

We put our client’s users first to design market-leading digital products

Tackling challenges across such a broad range of digital initiatives threw up multiple challenges. But we knew that we needed to put user needs at the heart of any new products. We partnered with our client’s global leadership team to agree customer propositions and deliverables. Then we dug into deep customer research – mapping user journeys and pain points, running service design sprints to create the best customer experiences for all the digital products in the portfolio and testing and learning with the products live in the market. Bringing everything to life with products that delivered from the outset.

We brought our client’s digital capabilities up to speed by handpicking Baringa talent to establish key senior product roles within their digital product division. Experts in digital propositions, loyalty schemes and subscription services. With roles and responsibilities defined our experts built knowledge and trained our client’s people on the skills needed to run their digital product portfolio. Beyond just delivering digital propositions, we cemented a digital vision at the heart of the business, bringing teams together from across the business – marketing, finance, operations and technology. In doing so, we ensured that new digital initiatives had business-wide buy-in and could run seamlessly on launch.

A raft of highly rated new products - the perfect springboard for our client’s digital-first strategy

Over 15-months we designed from scratch, built and launched our client’s first iOS app in the App Store in May 2021 and their first digital loyalty programme in November 2021. This app quickly soared into the top 10. We also held key product roles in running and evolving their industry-first digital coffee subscription service

including developing innovative customer- and commercial-led features. With their new smart loyalty proposition, our client can truly understand customer behaviour for the first time, enabling them to build relationships with customer with real-time, personalised experiences. This is already driving sizeable commercial benefits, empowering our client to make data-driven decisions in the pursuit of their global growth targets.

Find out how we help our clients in Customer and Digital