We're interviewing some of the most influential people in the digital retail space to bring you some of the hottest insights and learn what's next for the future of customer experience in retail.
This week we spoke with Sezin Cagil. Sezin is an Agile Delivery Manager at global coffee company Costa Coffee, and an expert in product management, engineering, and design. Costa Coffee has been voted the nation's favourite coffee shop for 12 consecutive years in the UK!
You can view the full collection of our Top Voices in Retail interview series here.
Hi Sezin, can you tell me a bit about your background and your area of responsibility at Costa Coffee?
I begin my technology career as a frontend developer and designer and gradually and organically moved to team management and delivery management. My journey with Costa started as HR Delivery Manager for the web team and then I moved to manage international customer experiences, and then became Senior Agile Delivery Manager. I look after two teams of developers, one is the web team, the other is international consumer experiences.
Costa Coffee is a hugely successful retail franchise. Can you tell me more about the brand and the business model?
Costa begin in 1971 and is now present in 42 markets globally, operating on three platforms: Served (coffee shops), Express (state of the art coffee machines) and FMCG (to enjoy Costa at home). The UK & Ireland is our biggest market, where we have over 2,800 stores and 12,000 Express machines.
The Web team currently manages 18 websites and there are 5 more in the pipeline for this year. Our web technology is flexible to support multiple languages and content types and the content is completely managed by local teams, after they are trained by us.
How would you describe the type of customers you serve at Costa Coffee?
We serve so many different personas, from true coffee lovers, including those commuting to work, to those who want to relax and socialize with a bite to eat and coffee. Our customers are also often looking for seasonal treats and limited-edition products, especially at Halloween and Christmas.
We also tailor experiences to various locations: one example of this is for Diwali in India. We have created three unique drinks to celebrate the festivities in our stores there.
What do your customers expect from your digital experience?
They want convenience and ease of use, like click-and-collect, as well as experiences that are personalized and rewarding, such as a surprise gift for their birthday. Our customers can order via the Costa Club app and arrange for their coffee to be delivered to their car or use our drive-throughs.
Is there a specific digital experience you've built that has been especially successful?
Store locator has been very successful and the success comes from our collaboration with the markets on their requirements. For example, our Japan team requested that we have a section on the store locator where they can add a picture and a description because they wanted to showcase the portfolio of restaurants and brands that they partner with. It's unusual for us, but in Japan it's very common to order a coffee with your meal, so we have coffee machines with Costa beans in a lot of restaurants.
Internationalising the UK app was another big success for us. We modularised the UK app to support international requirements and add the ability to customize so the same technology can be used globally supporting loyalty propositions in different markets.
Why did you choose to transform your digital capabilities with a MACH/Composable approach?
In general, we invest in technology that's highly customizable and easy to scale-up, that is where MACH comes in. While working on the loyalty program in India, we weren't sure what level of consumer volumes to expect so we needed a solution that could scale easily. We needed our systems to be serverless with high automation. This is because, as a central team, we deliver our solutions globally and iterations are faster as server management is moved away from the team.
MACH technologies are very easy to adopt with microservice based architecture that are exposed through APIs. Being cloud-native they are easy to scale - they provide all the solutions we need to quickly and easily scale both our infrastructure and our squads.
For us, MACH wasn't a decision because we wanted to be cutting-edge. It was a decision because we NEEDED the solutions that MACH provided our business.
With older technologies, most of the time you need specialist developers to make one single change. Whereas, with MACH, you can easily integrate specific solutions like Contentful and your content manager can go ahead and make the changes they need.
With a MACH setup, you can use a solution like Occtoo's Experience Data Platform. As far as I understand from my readings, it creates the data layer which makes data easily accessible without complex integrations; in a way it integrates systems that are un-integrateable. Occtoo hides all of that complexity.
What major benefits have you seen from going MACH/Composable?
- Being able to deploy to India from the UK
- Being able to record everything through pipelines without any complexity
- The flexibility to plug in and plug out different technologies with Composable Architecture. Although we haven’t done this yet, the architectures provide technology the ability to mature with the business
- We can deploy more websites/more digital experiences in a faster time frame and more efficiently
- Deploying a solution quicker also means that we receive feedback much quicker than we did before, so we can evolve and improve at a faster pace
From a technical perspective, we can now deploy a new website in just 15 minutes! Something that would previously have taken us months.
Would you do anything differently if you were to do the MACH journey again?
One learning I would take away is to be mindful about business users and how the solution can be operated. The internal teams that we work with tend to be operational, and the IT teams are not digital in the way that we are. You need to understand those differences when you're combining virtual digital solutions with physical tech and physical presence in stores. To help us operate correctly, it's important to upskill those teams and make sure everyone understands what we're working with.
If you were to give one piece of advice to someone working with digital experience in retail, what would that advice be?
Communicate with your operations team to understand how they will operate your digital solution. It's very easy for us to build, but it can be challenging for our teams working directly with the product and serving consumers.
In summary
Building a strong digital presence and leveraging your data to make customer experience more personal is a great way to grow customer value and lengthen customer lifetime.
Your data holds infinite business value, so you must ensure it's of good quality and exposed to your channels, where your teams can make real-time use of it and build upon customer relationships both in-store and online.
Learn how to go Composable without replacing your current tech stack today!
Did you know? Occtoo is a member of the MACH Alliance and a perfect solution for connecting data in your MACH/Composable stack. Book a demo with us today to learn more.
About Occtoo
Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform that supports retailers and brands to build relevant digital experiences and applications at rapid speed. Occtoo’s SaaS platform makes it easy to access and unify enterprise data from backend systems such as CRM, ERP, PIM, etc. and combine it with behavioral and contextual data to create relevant digital experiences that can be deployed in any channel or frontend in real-time at a global scale. Occtoo was founded in 2019 and has companies such as Cartier, Fjällräven, and Nordic Nest on their customer list.