Costa uses our decision intelligence platform to analyse loyalty scheme behaviour and sales performance.

The company.

Costa is a popular brand on the UK high street. From its London roots in 1971, in recent years the coffee chain has grown to become a worldwide favourite, with over 3,800 shops in 32 countries. We’ve worked with Costa for three years, with recent projects including customer loyalty and product range optimisation.

The challenge.

Costa sought to understand how Costa Club members behave. Costa Club is an app-based loyalty programme, offering members free drinks, birthday treats and regular personalised offers.

Crucially, Costa needed to know how loyalty consumers’ behaviour is changing – and how it influences sales.

They were keen to easily access insights such as:

• Participation in Costa Club (i.e. how active loyalty members are).
• How frequently loyalty consumers shop with Costa.
• How many items Costa Club members buy.
• How different consumer groups behave (in terms of demographics, store profiles and transaction types).
• How Costa Club members’ category and product purchases are changing over time.

The solution.

Costa’s questions are easily answered by our AI-powered SaaS platform.

We started by plugging Costa’s loyalty data into HyperFinity, then structured it so we could understand year-on-year sales performance. The result is an interactive BI dashboard, which shows year-on-year customer data and sales drivers.

We included drill downs and cross tabs so the team could deep dive into the mechanics of their data. This is three-dimensional, allowing Costa to understand how customer segments, product categories and sales drivers interact. It answers questions like:

• What’s driving sales?
• How do sales and transactions compare each year, based on product categories, consumer missions, demographics, stores etc.
• How does sales performance in 2024 compare with preceding years?
• Which segments are spending more in the coffee category year-on-year?
• Why is this spend increasing? Are consumers shopping more? Spending more?
• What are the high-level trends in the data?

The results.

Costa’s data science and commercial teams have access to our AI-powered retail platform. Their BI dashboard refreshes automatically every month, so they can easily monitor insights and make data-driven commercial decisions based on loyalty metrics.

The dashboard has highlighted strategic challenges for Costa. For example, year-on-year behaviour in two customer segments has altered significantly, whilst Drive-Thru versus high street store performance has shifted. Without access to an AI-powered dashboard, insights like these are easily buried in mountains of data.

What’s next?

An AI-powered BI dashboard is a critical component of great strategic retail decisions. As well as understanding how loyalty club members behave, a BI project can use anonymous debit card transaction data to uncover how non-loyalty customers behave. This builds a more complete picture of consumer behaviour.

We’re continuing to work closely with Costa. The HyperFinity team is building on a previous product range optimisation project to help define the optimal product assortment for different Costa store profiles.

Imagine what your retail business could do with instant access to sales performance drivers and/or loyalty scheme behaviour analysis. Contact us for a demo.