Costa Coffee puts customers at the heart of digital transformation

The Nation’s Favourite Coffee Shop*, Costa Coffee, is shifting its focus towards the digital consumer and is leveraging the powerful hybrid integration and API capabilities of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to unlock data from across the organisation and build an application network to accelerate innovation and drive customer loyalty and sales. The implementation and deployment of the platform has been carried out in partnership with WHISHWORKS, a MuleSoft integration specialist. 

 

Spearheading the shift are Costa’s digitally enhanced Costa Coffee Club loyalty programme and the newly launched Costa Collect feature of the Costa Club app, which enables customers to place and pay for an order from their phone and then collect it in-store.

 

“For us, offering our customers a better service through a unified omnichannel, personalised, and immediate experience, is paramount. While designing a new loyalty experience for the modern, digitally savvy consumer, it became clear that our legacy infrastructure could not provide the required connectivity, flexibility and responsiveness.” commented Phil Scully, CIO at Costa Coffee.

 

WHISHWORKS, with a long history of successful integration and data transformation projects within the consumer goods sector,worked with the Costa Coffee team to deploy MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform taking an API-led approach to integration. Using Anypoint Platform, WHISHWORKS helped connect the coffee chain’s back-end and front-end systems and applications and build APIs to rapidly release siloed data and create a clear and secure data landscape. This enhanced connectivity gave Costa Coffee the much-needed unified view of its operation, allowing them to increase efficiency and accelerate pace of business at a significantly lower cost.

 

“Working closely with the Costa Coffee team and leveraging MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, we were able to eliminate point-to-point connections as well as multiple potential points of failure. Instead, we use API-led connectivity to integrate all the back-end systems to the different physical and digital touchpoints and introduce enhancements and innovative features not just to the Costa Club app, but across the retailer’s operation,’ commented Suman Konkumalla, Chief Strategy Officer, WHISHWORKS.

 

In parallel with the loyalty and collect programmes, WHISHWORKS has been helping Costa introduce further efficiencies using Anypoint Platform, aiming to reduce effort and errors across the organisation. Among these efficiencies are the Global Store Locator application that reduces the time needed to update shop information on the Costa website from one day to just seconds. 

 

“With WHISHWORKS and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform we are now able to accelerate innovation, adding new features and offers and improving the overall customer experience. The recent launch of push notifications through our mobile application is a great example. In just one month, we were able to develop the necessary new APIs and modify existing ones to enable the new functionality through the integration of our eCommerce platform with the Costa Coffee Club mobile application,” Phil Scully adds.