The Future of Digital Loyalty

We weren't meeting our customer's expectations. If we're not meeting those expectations, we're not going to get to that goal of being the most loved restaurant and brand by Gen Z.

So when speaking to customers and also to our diners in the restaurants, we saw that they were really frustrated by the plastic card. The best thing and also the worst thing about our customers is that they're incredibly passionate and they will abundantly tell you, as you can see by all the comments on the slide here.

And also where we could be doing better. And we could've, we should've been doing a lot better with how customers can engage with the loyalty program. Customers that ultimately outgrown the plastic card that we've moved on to. And they demanded a better experience.

So from this we engaged with Red Badger to look, to see how we can exceed our customer's expectations. So we put together a product team. One of the first within Nando's made up of, product managers, delivery leads, UX, UI, and engineers, all within the team.

But with the focus of how can we deliver a better experience for our loyalty customers. We started off by taking that customer centric approach and looking at what were the problems and the frustrations that our customers had. And by going into restaurants, speaking to them, doing competitive research, and again, because our customers are the best in the world, they are more than happy to spend time and let us know what they think.

What we found out was that for Gen Z customers, they'd grown up with technology embedded in their life. And therefore, when they came to a brand like Nando's, they expected us to be able to already have those solutions to their problems and to meet them there.

And with that, they expect us to be on the pulse and ready. So after understanding all of those problems, we went away to ideate and looking at all the solutions that we came up with, there was one clear winner that we thought about that would exceed Gen Z customers' expectations and ultimately everyone else's.

So we decided to look at adopting mobile wallet technology. So to enable customers to have it on their phone and be able to tap it at the till as we went through a whole product development process, much like how we started with, uh, understanding customer's problems by speaking to them and testing with them, we continued that strategy into product development. So we'd go into restaurants and we built loads of different email designs to help test and understand them. We needed to see what worked with customers, if they understood it, if they would go through, and add the mobile wallet to their past, through to then running a whole, a trial with 12 restaurants within, the Leicester area.

Just launching it organically to see, if customers would take it up and interact with it. And the result of this was we were able to launch the UK-first NFC-enabled loyalty, mobile wallet pass to working, um, working to get hardware in restaurants, a whole new digital onboarding journey enabled across our website and the app.

And it was fantastic. We were really happy with the results that we saw from our Beta. We learned a lot from it and we made sure that, we would put we're listening to frustrations and problems and trying to solve them by putting more control over, more control into customer's hands, by making sure they had the headache on them all the time, that they were able to make sure that they knew what they could get with our rewards.

And that was clearly visible on the front of the pass. And it was just easy to interact with. And we had some amazing feedback from the beta group. So we were at the stage where we were ready to do a whole, launch campaign. And it was a really good one.

There were some amazing, really cheeky ideas from a lot of the customer team and Nando's but unfortunately, I think we all know what happens next... is COVID hits.

A growing appetite for delivery

Hopefully, as we emerge out of the pandemic, you'll be aware that we've got now three really well-established channels. So, Eat-In is back open and, we're loving seeing customers come back into restaurants and, but customers behaviour really has changed.

Ultimately, there's more appetite for delivery and click and collect, and we've now got a proper multichannel loyalty scheme. Our digital footprint has increased massively we've, been able to take a lot of the learnings from everything we've done and apply it and be able to demonstrate benefit the benefit of the reward scheme to customers. And a lot simpler way and the results have been incredible.

So pre-pandemic, we saw 30% penetration rate of loyalty scheme and now on our digital channels now click and collect we see 60% of all of our orders have a reward card associated to it. And it goes even higher up into 19 to, uh, where if they're interacting on the app. And it's also been a massive driver of our own delivery journey as well, that operates alongside delivery.

And in terms of redemptions, not only like, because it's easier to interact with, but we're also seeing it being engaged with more so from that 6% of, orders that had to redemption against we're now seeing around 15 to 30% of our orders, depending on which channel it is.

So it's just showing that all those learnings that we took from the card, this mobile wallet work that we did and delivering out these journeys and embedding them within our online ordering journeys had such a big impact to making sure that our best customers, the rewards customers were coming back to us and we're seeing really good retention rates.

Where are we going from there? So at the moment, it's a very value exchange based scheme, and it's doing really well. I think where we want to look to in the future is a lot of what Joel and Chris have already talked about, but how do we build that emotional loyalty with our customers?

And what's amazing about Nando's from the inside is that we have, we talk a lot about, some amazing things that we do from our work become carbon neutral last November, to our ambition, to be net-zero by 2030, there's some amazing work.

If you look up around our fight against malaria and with our peri farms initiative as well. And so it's looking at how do we bring our best customers, the ones that love us the most and be able to comfortably share these messages with them and to look at, look at how we can build a relationship through with our passions in Nandos and, and hopefully it mixes with their passions as well.

So not sure exactly what it looks like in the future, but we've got the right passion within Nandos. We've got the right tools. We've got an amazing understanding of our customers now based on the journey we've been through and i’m really excited about where we're going to take the scheme in the future.