Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Adapting for Today and Tomorrow: A Q&A with Kum & Go about Building a More Agile Loyalty Program
The company that would eventually become Kum & Go was founded in 1959 by Tony S. Gentle and William A. Krause in Hampton, Iowa. That first humble location in the middle of the Iowa countryside has grown to 400 locations across 13 different states in the Midwest, and today, Kum & Go brings A Fresh Perspective™ to the customers and communities it serves.
The brand’s purpose to make days better for customers can be found in its broad range of products offering more than traditional convenience store fare. Whether it’s freshly brewed coffee or fresh hot food that’s made to order in each store every day, Kum & Go has created a place where customers can fuel up at the pump and fill up in-store.
Kum & Go’s &Rewards program allows members to earn at the pump and in-store. Points can be converted into fuel discounts or cash. Redemption starts at 100 points. Exclusive member-only deals on food, beverages, fuel, and more offer customers additional incentives to enroll in the program through the app, via the brand’s website, or even in-store.
Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, spoke with Matt Riezman, Director of Brand Marketing, Matt Anderson, Director of Digital Customer Experience, and Matt Weber, Director of Business Insights & Analytics at Kum & Go, about the brand’s &Rewards program, the impact of the electronic vehicle (EV) market on loyalty strategies, and how the pandemic forced Kum & Go’s team to become more agile in leveraging technologies.
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty 360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty series. In this series, we get to speak with leading brands about what they are seeing and hearing on the front lines of customer and channel and brand loyalty, and today we have a first trifecta of Matt's from coming go. They're going to speak with us today. We have Matt Reesman, the director of brand marketing, matt Anderson, the director of digital customer experience, and Matt Weber, the director of business insights and analytics. How are you, gentlemen, today?
Speaker 3:Doing, great Wonderful, great Doing well Happy to be in good company of Matt's.
Speaker 1:Lots of Matt's and a lot of directors too. So it's got director Matt, so it's good.
Speaker 3:We do have other directors that aren't Matt here at the coming go in Maverick, so don't worry.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask if that was a prerequisite for the position that you had, matt, but that's good. That's not so good, but it's good that it is too so. Well again, I will quit with the jokes and we will get on to the interview. First off, we like to start these on a more personal level. Get to understand a little bit about you, the Matt's, with regard to your current role at coming go. What you guys do, maybe a passion or a fun fact you have outside work and maybe a little bit at your previous work history as well. So we'll start with Matt Reesman.
Speaker 3:All right, I see how that's going to be tough to kick it over to Matt. Matt Reesman. I'm the director of brand marketing here at coming go. So me and my team focus primarily on customer acquisition, customer retention and brand strategy, which spans a lot of things you know from all the way from store signage to social media to paid media, as well as lots, of, lots of inputs into the look into the rewards program as well. I have been at coming go for coming up on three years previous experience in the CPG world on the brand management side, so come with a lot of great experience for this role. Personally, man, it's always the toughest question fun, fact or passion. I'm passionate about cooking, so I guess I think a lot of the jobs I've had in marketing are never far from food or beverage, and coming goes no exception to that. So my, I guess I'm passionate about cooking and I like to do with my son, who's six. So we've been. We've been learning a lot of stuff lately, so that's me.
Speaker 1:It's always great to share your passions with your kids.
Speaker 2:That's good to do Matt Anderson?
Speaker 1:how about you?
Speaker 2:All right, matt Anderson, I am the director of the digital customer experience here at coming go. I am just over two years old here at coming go, so I still feel pretty new. That's also my first experience in kind of the world of retail, which is an exciting departure from the financial sector, which I specifically came from mortgage for the last 12 years. At coming go, my team overseas the loyalty platform, which is patronix, email notifications, our mobile and web app experience and any and all customer related inquiries to our loyalty platform and technical integrations with our digital partners. We really work hand in hand with Reesman's team to provide that value once the customer becomes part of the program and bringing them a longer journey. Fun fact about me is I've never been a soccer fan, but all of my kids have joined soccer and so that is our weekends that we live and breathe now as soccer.
Speaker 1:Good luck with that. It's a fun ride. I think I have a daughter that's playing soccer at University of Atkins Freshman, but it was fun 12 years before that. Lots of money invested, but it kind of works out in the end. Hopefully that's right. I think we have Matt Weber now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, hi, matt Weber, director of business insights and analytics, here at coming go. So I'm coming up on five years prior to that, this being Des Moines, iowa. Much like Matt Anderson, coming from insurance and financial services, my last role was as a senior data scientist for an insurance company here in town. Really, really enjoy retail. It's fast, it's just a lot of fun. It's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
Speaker 4:Our team kind of has three areas where we work. We've got kind of this core analytics data science team. We've got consumer and market research. We also do a lot of GIS, geo information systems. Obviously, figuring out where to build a new store is one of the most important decisions we make, so that part of my team is very involved in that process. Yeah, the fun facts are always tough. So since Matt Reisman got food related, I'll just keep it kind of food and C store related. I this summer have become quite fond of a roller grower. I got with our facilities team and they had an old like you see the big roller grills with the hot dogs and the egg rolls and everything in the stores. I was able to sweet talk one of our finance folks into or one of our facility folks into selling one that they were getting rid of, so I've been enjoying that. My kids love eating off of the roller grill when we host parties outside, so that's been a unexpected hit.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That sounds like a good addition to the backyard, for sure. Oh yeah, so for people who may not be familiar with coming go, can you tell us a little bit about the brand, the history of the brand? It would be great to know that.
Speaker 3:Sure I can jump in there. So coming go was founded. First store opened in 1959 up in Hampton, Iowa. We were founded by Tony Gentel and Bill Krause, our proud founders. We today operate as come and go just about 400 locations across 13 states and we're all of our businesses rooted in our company mission of making days better for our customers, the communities in which we serve, as well as all of our associates that work in our stores and at our store support center. So we talked about this a little bit in the intro, but last week the sale of come and go was finalized to Maverick out in Utah, and so we're now integrating into their organization and our new footprint will span over 20 states and over 800 stores. So it's an exciting time for us really growing quickly, and we'll be continuing to grow in the future.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, your loyalty program. We'd love to know a little bit more about it how it was designed, how customers engage with it and what are some of the benefits to the brand and to the consumer for the program itself.
Speaker 3:Sure. So our rewards program is called and rewards, referencing the and and come and go. We just launched a brand new refresh of the program, August 1st, so still called and rewards, but it brings a lot of new features, along with the new mobile app that we're super excited about. I think the focus of the program is really bringing savings and value at come and go to our members. So I think it operates in a fairly typical way. Our customers register through our app on the web or they can register at store as well. From there, every new member gets a welcome bundle we call it and it's a thank you for signing up and it has free items.
Speaker 3:Fuel discounts get some familiar with the program. Then, from there, customers are earning points for every purchase. So they earn points for fuel, earn points in store and then they take those points and can redeem them for what they want. So we have two main options, which is our annual rewards cash or and fuel discounts. So annual rewards cash is cash you can use in store and fuel discounts are sent off a gallon. So we're really proud of that choice that we give our customers. That was a big part of the new program and it's a big way that our customers receive benefit Then, as well as receiving access to a lot of exclusive offers that are only available to our members. Hopefully a high level overview.
Speaker 1:That's great. We have a C-store working group actually at Loaded 360 and there's a lot of redesigning program trying to make them more effective, more engaging, and sounds like you're doing the same thing for reward, cash and fuel offering to make it personalized but flexible, which is good to hear.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Excellent. You mentioned you just launched a new app part of the rewards program. Can you share us a little bit more about the app, how it works, what the role customer feedback may have played in the launch of the app?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So the feedback, I think right off the bat, being able to convert those points to cash and fuel was one of the driving forces. And how do we have our customers interact to do that? So one of the pieces Matt had come up with Reesman is the ability to do that within app but also web. We don't always have our customers in the mobile experience. We also have to serve those customers that don't have the ability to use mobile to interact with us. So going forward, that's the value in the proposition there. But in line with that, we've also heard from our customers they wanted the ability to purchase products and pick them up in store curbside. So we enhanced that ability to do it with including alcohol and tobacco. Then with the new loyalty program they have the opportunity to manage those points.
Speaker 2:What I said with the app and in the website, we also want to push the boundaries. You had mentioned before about the personalization, customization. We really wanted to lean into that, something we haven't seen a lot of, but we really wanted to give our customers that know me experience. We've got 100 plus data points that we can use to really talk to our customers and market to them. Our customers have pretty well responded to that right, knowing where they are, what they're doing. But our vendors are the other customers that I would take into this. They've really latched onto this ability to really talk to them, deliver them that personalization, those offers that they feel more in tune to the customer, instead of just going out to the broader audience.
Speaker 1:Okay, excellent, when you look at the program, how do you hope to evolve the program going forward?
Speaker 2:So I'll keep it at a high level. Really fine tuning that customization and personalization is really going to drive us. Knowing our customer, knowing their habits, catering to what they need and knowing what they need is really going to help drive this loyalty program to make the more value of it. As well as the products that they want, we can listen to the market. If they want new products in, can we do that and make it available as well as digital only offers, right, always having them engage with us that way, then it makes it more lucrative for vendors too as well. So instead of getting a $5 off something because you're a customer with this now, I can provide you specifically with a $15 offer instead. So really really driving into those will really help us going forward in the future.
Speaker 1:Okay, we actually just did an interview with PDI Accentus on kind of the state of fuel loyalty with EVs coming right, fuel prints sorry, footprints changing the whole app experience being a little different as well, so you kind of touched on that as well. How do you see kind of the maybe the product offering from Electric maybe, or to kind of different offerings, and how will that potentially impact customer experience? Could it have potentially longer wait times in store or opportunities to engage in store? Is that something you guys are looking at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've had conversations around from the EV market. It's a disjointed process today. Right, I've got to have an app to do this, to start it over here. Then I've got to have an app to interact with the store and purchase something to your point around the long wait times. Ideally in the future, just like our fueling experience today that we have, we bring a charging experience in. That would be the ideal state. So they're really interacting with us and within the app. When you talk about the wait times, depending on where the charging times are at, they're starting to go down year by year. We've got the made to order food. That's a great way to bring them in. There's ways to offer and incentivize them to get those in-store trips. I think that's where some of the benefit can come from. Matt, or Matt Webber, reisman, do you guys have anything you want to add?
Speaker 3:The only thing I would add is one of the big things we're working on is what I call non-transactional engagement opportunities. So right now, we have a lot of ways for customers to engage based on the transaction, which is great, it's important, but for a lot of our customers think about customers at shop with us daily. We have a lot of customers at shop with us multiple times a day. They're looking for and open to even more, and so we're working to build in some more non-transactional opportunities. Whether that's more gamification, it would be an obvious one, but there's lots of other stuff that we're working on in the background. I don't want to reveal too much, but I think when you think about wait times, that fits in really nicely with let's keep your it coming go. We're happy to keep you in our ecosystem and allow you to engage as a customer beyond just the stuff you buy and the offers that you make you.
Speaker 1:So there's a good deal of discussion with regard to customers, how they're changing, evolving expectations, meeting men, the channel that they want to be in, the brands of both the 360 we talk about that every few months part of a meeting set we have. Where do you see your customer changing? How have they changed? Going into COVID, coming out of COVID and then how are you adapting to that change?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I can take that one. It's been a wild three years. We started with the pandemic and it was this catalyst of pandemic lockdown. Then we had massive supply chain issues and the great resignation and historic inflation and interest rates and lingering fears of recession. So it's just the cumulative impact on the consumer and their behavior and the expectations is just it's happened so fast. We early on were really trying to just figure out what was going on. But during COVID, as we got into the early parts of the pandemic and this is where the loyalty data this is a huge benefit of the loyalty program we were able to figure a lot of this out through the loyalty data we can see over time. But we started to really see customers started using us for these like fill-in trips and buying a lot more of the take-home sizes. They were willing to pay more for this kind of low touch in and out quickly experience getting in and out in, say, three minutes versus having, during the pandemic, wander through this huge store with all these people. So that was something that we noticed pretty quickly and we tried to shift some assortment to in our stores to support those fill-in grocery trips. People started shifting from the fountain drinks and the grab and go on my favorite roller grower. They started to go to more of the prepackaged and tight products there. So, again, loyalty data was really helping us there. Figure that out quickly.
Speaker 4:The morning commute obviously everybody's working from home that's a big day part, big segment for us that clearly was Was impacted by COVID. So we've seen some big shifts there and, like you know, just our day parts, but that in the last year and a half kind of started to shift back. You know a lot of the things. Some things are saying the same, but some of the things are starting to shift back. And then inflation hits and that just accelerated it and we started to see customers budgeting more and they're starting to trade down to less expensive product options and brands, and even, you know, own brands. So Inflation is getting back to normal. But there's just still a lot of pressure on the consumer spending. You know you've got higher interest rates, student loans coming back, savings from the pandemic are starting to dwindle. So we still see these value shopping behaviors Continuing and that's really where, again, where that loyalty becomes part of that value proposition and Matt Matt we're talking about like that. That's one of the ways where we can really demonstrate Value and try and help with some of that.
Speaker 4:Some of those budgeting challenges there with the convenience and and then clearly on the on the technical side, like convenience was, we were behind the curve on a lot of the, the technologies, the mobile ordering, the self-checkout, you know, tap to pay all of those things and and Matt Matt's teams, you know, just in a very short period of time we added online ordering, a way to activate the fuel pumps from your phone. We put self-checkout in the stores, like it. One of the benefit was it pushed us for technology to adopt a lot of things that were, I don't know at the time, nice to have and they're just Now assumed right, like it's a, it's a must-have. So I Don't I maybe 2024 will be normal, but I'd be surprised. So who knows? Who knows what's what's happening next? But if nothing else, covid in that period taught us to be agile and we're going to be able to respond and pivot a lot quicker than we had in the In the past and with the digital and loyalty platform we can iterate really quickly.
Speaker 1:Well, it's good, I think, to your point. It's the the, the transactional data Overlaid with any behavioral data and also zero-party data as well, to truly help personalized communication, content, engagement, but also get feedback on store footprints and you know that if they're interested in EV and especially with the custom-made food, that you have a great opportunity to leverage a loyalty program for that rich. You know data sets that you have when you look at privacy. Privacy is a big area of concern for our members. We just finished a report, research report, on privacy. Had a meeting on it yesterday. Big challenge with regard to privacy regulations California, virginia, colorado. You know how do you look at privacy and then have you implemented changes with regard to your customer loyalty or your data collection initiatives due to you know your current or kind of the state of customer privacy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Well, with the, with the mobile app going out, we did provide our customers with an easier way of Requesting not to sell their data and to delete their data right, so we have implemented that. We haven't ran into any states where we've had those regulations outside of what Colorado was proposing and then, as we've been acquired by Maverick, will probably start doing more in that regard. There's always a balance between privacy and personalization that we always have to balance of what our customer needs versus our business needs are. We do err on the side of caution by only keeping what we need when we need it, and we do ask for transparent. We do. We are transparent up front with our customers and what we are doing.
Speaker 1:Okay excellent when you look at your program, customer loyalty focus and what are two or three things that you're most proud of with your customer loyalty program?
Speaker 3:I can start with that. One just haven't talked in a bit. I kind of already gave this away, but I think one of the main things for me is the personalization and flexibility. We spent over two years building the new program, and one of the first things we did was we talked to our current members. We talked to our former members. We talked to people who had never joined and really understood what they wanted, because for us to go spend money to create a new loyalty program, we wanted to know that we were creating something that was flexible for the future but also was giving our customers what they wanted, and so the personalization and flexibility we built into the program is we didn't do it just to serve us. We did it to serve them, to serve our members and our prospective members, and so that's. It's something that we've already seen our customers enjoying and will hopefully retain them for the future.
Speaker 3:The second thing I would say is the differentiated app experience. I don't want to steal Matt Anderson's thunder, but I think, when I look at from a customer perspective, every brand is asking customers to download an app. Today, my kid I have two kids and I have to have an app for each of their schools. It's not the same app, of course, and so if we're asking our customers to download an app, I want it. It should be something that adds value to their life. It's not just making them go into another place on their phone just to shop it come and go. And so I think we've, I feel like we've done a really good job of that. You know, credit to Matt and his team, it's so those, I think those are the two things for me that stand out the most.
Speaker 1:Okay, excellent. Anyone else want to?
Speaker 4:no, when you look at other customer loyalty programs.
Speaker 1:Are there some brands that you're loyal to from a customer loyalty perspective and, if so, what do you like about their offerings? Matt Reesman.
Speaker 3:I'll take it. I mean, I think we're, I think we're a little different from the average customer because we think about this stuff all day. So my, you know my answer is probably biased towards being a little bit wonky, but I mean it's cliche. But Starbucks, to me, is still still setting, still setting the standard for a lot of, a lot of what is done in loyalty programs, just the.
Speaker 3:I think the thing that that I admire about what they do is they seem to be able to meet customer. They're so good at meeting customers where they are and it's something that was important. You know, it was important as we built our program that, you know, the customer of the shops twice a day come and go every day, and the customer of the shops once every two weeks. We need to be able to have an experience that works for both of them because they're both valuable to us as customers. The other one that, the other one that always that continues to impress me, is Jimmy John's. The simplicity, the simplicity and and efficiency of their program is impressive. You know that's having having helped build a new loyalty program. I just I look at what they do and it's so clean, it's, it works so well and you know, it seems like when they roll out something it's it's flawless every time, so I admire what they're doing as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's right. Matt Anderson, do you have any programs?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I jump on the bandwagon with Jimmy John's, the, the achievement badges, right that gamification, being able to do that by using purchasing like the Gauntlet, was a great way to get customers to purchase the food but also rewarded at the end. That kind of killed two birds with one stone. I really liked that ability to do it. So I would echo what Matt had just said.
Speaker 1:Okay and last question we have in what loyalty 360 to help you and your team with your customer loyalty efforts?
Speaker 2:Go ahead, matt. I was going to say for me, what would be beneficial for me is peer to peer networking. Again, I'm so new into this understanding our peers and what they're doing, how to you know the best practices. That would be extremely beneficial to me.
Speaker 4:We, as we as a company, just culture wise we love to benchmark, we love to get with our peers and understand what they're doing. There's like a touch of FOMO there, like are we missing out on the next? You know the big idea that somebody is doing, and in any industry, not just in retail, just from a loyalty perspective, so that's something that that that we really enjoy doing is talking with our peers and learning about how they're doing. It's also sometimes good to just hear that other people share some of the challenges you have and talk about how, how they're addressing those. So those connections are really, really great.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Well, that's definitely a lot of things. We focus on the peer, peer communities, a big piece of what we're doing research and truly trying to elevate the whole discussion around customer loyalty, and obviously what you guys are doing is. It was commendable and great to hear, for sure. So thanks to the three max the directors, the three Matt directors, for the very interesting discussion. Give me to learn a little bit more about come and go. Hopefully. The partnership with Maverick is a smashing success and you look forward to hearing more from the combined teams going forward.
Speaker 4:Really appreciate the time.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you Chad. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you all for taking the time to listen today. Make sure to join us back for another edition of our leaders and customer loyalty series soon, and have a wonderful day.