Digital customer retention

Where on earth is that darn voucher? It would have earned me so many points again when I bought detergent! I kept it for weeks and then misplaced it at the crucial moment. Collecting coupons can be tricky. In Turkey, An app makes possible what used to be a truly Sisyphean task.

In Turkey, collecting things is a tradition. Coupons, crisps, coins – everything is collected and then you can exchange it for a gift. This collecting is innate in humans: the reward centre in the brain releases happy hormones, and the joy of the little bonus automatically turns into brand loyalty. At least that's the marketing department's calculation. For kiosk owners, the intermediate trade and sales staff, it was a major challenge and sometimes hard work to make this equation work. Coupons were available from PepsiCo Turkey mainly in snack packaging and under fizzy lids. Customers could hand them in at their trusted store and redeem them immediately. But then the snippets of coupon information passed through far too many hands: first counted in the store, they ended up at the wholesaler, from where – recounted – they went to the distributor and finally a report was made to the PepsiCo Turkey headquarters. As a result, over 100 million soda lids and coupons passed through all these stations each year. The pressure of suffering and costs was correspondingly high.

About five years ago, PepsiCo Turkey was increasingly keen to digitalise its advertising activities and campaigns in this area. This was not only to save costs, but also to explore new avenues of customer retention and user engagement. Today, the new digital loyalty platform in the form of a smartphone app can do much more. Years of brainstorming, conceptualisation, prototyping and testing lay between the two – and now the digital customer loyalty tool is continuously being developed and adapted to the rapidly changing needs of end consumers in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. ‘The FMCG sector is aggressive and fast-paced,’ says Ali Can Yildirim, explaining the industry. He is a Digital Transformation Consultant at adesso Turkey. ‘And we had to come up with something to help our customer PepsiCo Turkey remain competitive in this demanding market.’

The team came up with the ideas in adesso's Interaction Room in Istanbul. All relevant interest groups within the PepsiCo Turkey organisation were able to get to know each other in the creative and constructive atmosphere of the workshop and discuss the values, goals and risks of the project. The walls were covered with notes and sketches. The two-day brainstorming session thought through the entire user journey, defined the appropriate technology and highlighted the advantages for stores and PepsiCo Turkey sales that would arise from digitalisation. At the end of the moderated process, there was a plan: after a proof-of-concept phase, a prototype would be developed that the team could use to test whether it was convenient and self-explanatory for end customers to use. adesso had grown from a consulting agency to a full-service provider: from the idea to the development and operation of the app, everything was to come from a single source – implemented by an agile team.

And the user experience would be clearly in focus from the outset. However, ‘as is usually the case in the FMCG industry, as a company, we don't know our consumers personally,’ observes Mehmet Behlil, Consumer Loyalty Programs Marketing Manager at PepsiCo Turkey. ‘Our products go to supermarkets, corner stores, cafes and restaurants. We don't have any direct points of contact with consumers.’ So teams set out with the prototype of the new app to try it out in-store and get customer feedback. What was a challenge in the development process – a lack of knowledge about customers – would never be a problem again after the app was launched: The fact that the KazandiRio app has now been downloaded over 30 million times also represents a never-ending stream of data on the consumption of PepsiCo Turkey products. 300,000 users are active every day, and two million per month. The KazandiRio team can now evaluate and process the data in real time. No third party has to collect and deliver expensive data. This is an exception, especially in the consumer goods sector. It's a plus for the group, where all kinds of requests are now being sent from other national teams to Turkey: ‘How did you do that?’ And then, in addition to the data gained, those involved can also proudly tell of the interaction with users through push and in-app messages. After all, direct communication with customers is invaluable. In this win-win situation, the second plus point goes to consumers, who can look forward to great gifts when they buy snacks and soft drinks: more snacks and drinks, but also gaming vouchers or discounts in online stores, for example. ‘The costs saved by the transformation from analogue to digital alone finance the entire project,’ says Marketing Manager Behlil.

Customers can collect their gifts in the wallet of their app and redeem them in store or directly online at the next opportunity. This way, no value code can ever be lost again. Fraud is ruled out, because each sequence of numbers and letters is unique. And the new app technology makes it possible to set up new security mechanisms at any time. And the third plus point in this win-win-win situation goes to the adesso team in Turkey. Since the kick-off in the Interaction Room, the collaboration with PepsiCo Turkey in Turkey has been a partnership of equals – with many ideas for the future development of the KazandiRio app. The KazandiRio project marks the beginning of the digital transformation of commercial processes at PepsiCo Turkey. The project is also the prelude to the conversion of the entire IT team to agile methods.