Revolutionizing loyalty: AI-driven personalization

Leading coffee chain

In the highly competitive retail coffee market, a leading international coffee chain recognized the need to rejuvenate its customer loyalty program. Despite engaging over 15 million customers weekly, the program's growth was hampered by an outdated and rigid platform. The vendor's platform lacked the necessary flexibility for optimization, rapid deployment, and effective measurement of marketing campaigns. This stagnation not only threatened the program's future growth but also positioned the coffee chain at a crossroads with an impending multi-year contract renewal, which would impose significant financial and operational constraints.

Kin + Carta's approach was strategic and multifaceted. Initially, we focused on improving leadership's visibility into the program's performance. Through the development of advanced visualization tools and analytics, we provided actionable insights that were previously difficult to see. Our team crafted flexible, in-house models that significantly improved the efficiency of discount allocation and product recommendation processes. These models ensured a seamless operational transition from the existing vendor platform to our more agile solution.

The journey didn't stop there. Recognizing the need for a robust platform that could adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, we carefully evaluated potential vendors, ensuring the chosen platform could not only match but exceed the functionalities of the legacy system. This included integrating cutting-edge technologies such as Azure, Databricks, and sophisticated AI and machine learning algorithms to enhance customer engagement and personalization.

A pivotal component of our delivery was the formation of an experimental scrum team. This cross-functional unit was tasked with exploiting the new platform's capabilities, conducting controlled experiments that informed a comprehensive roadmap for ongoing improvements and innovations.

Technology used

Artificial intelligence

Machine Learning

Key results

$5.5 million weekly revenue increase, a direct result of the revamped personalized marketing program.
Enhanced program autonomy, facilitating rapid innovation and responsiveness—critical during the unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2x the program's size, fueled by innovative customer engagement strategies and experiences.

$5.5M weekly revenue increase

2x the program's size

The moment the old vendor systems were finally gone and we were 100% on the in-house version was really cool, as the culmination of years of work. What is even more impressive is that the customer experience remained intact the whole time - if you used the app you likely never knew the entire backend had been changed.
Kin + Carta Team Member
The “experimental scrum” is one of the coolest things I’ve been involved in and a really fresh way of working within a large enterprise, which is typically very slow to experiment and innovate. More organizations need programs like this!
Kin + Carta Team Member