Caffe Nero’s First Year Mobile Payments, Order-Ahead
By now, we all know that the mobile payments concept has been very good to Starbucks, to the point where having mobile order-ahead and mobile payments together in the same place has actually caused a few problems for the company. It’s even forced the company to reconsider how it’s being used. The failures now fairly clear, and the potential for success now substantial, it’s no surprise to see other companies jumping in. UK coffee chain Caffe Nero has been using mobile order-ahead for the last year now, and reports suggest it’s been a good year indeed.
Caffe Nero set up a partnership with Yoyo Wallet to bring mobile order-ahead into play, and the end results have been astonishing. Caffe Nero notes that customer engagement levels are up, and in turn, sales and customer retention are likewise up.
Sounds awfully nonspecific, but Caffe Nero could back it up. Before the app, the only thing Caffe Nero could track was the number of people who came in stores every day by tracking Wi-Fi monitoring system output. With the new mobile payments system, a wide range of new tracking options opened up and were used accordingly. Customer basket data is now analyzable, and the data created is kept secure enough to protect customers but readily-accessible enough that the business can put it to use.
Big data has been a major part of business for some time now, as it allows companies to better determine what’s working and what isn’t. Everything from store staffing levels to what a store stocks can get a shot in the arm from big data, but there’s one problem. Much as the name suggests, big data requires data—and generally large amounts of it—to produce what are called “actionable insights,” or “things we can do based on what people seem to want.” So Caffe Nero basically took matters into its own hands and set up a system that would not only provide that data, but provide its users a useful service in exchange.
It’s already done its job pretty well, and we’ll likely only see further uses of it as we go. Mobile payments aren’t just ways to pay a bill, they’re also ways to make a business better. Caffe Nero, and many others, are proof.