Casey’s Is More Convenient with Mobile Apps

Casey’s General Stores, which operates 2,300 convenience stores throughout the southern and midwestern United States, wanted to increase e-commerce, brand loyalty, and customer retention with a mobile food ordering app and legacy software replacement.

The company, which is headquartered in Ankeny, Iowa, is deeply rooted in its customers and communities, but technology has played a stronger role in recent years, according to Art Sebastian, its vice president of digital experience.

The journey started in 2018, when executives decided the 50-year-old company needed a digital transformation. They hired consultant Deloitte Digital, which recommended SAP’s Customer Data Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Business One solutions.

Casey’s went live with a new SAP-powered website in May 2019 and added a mobile app just four months later.

“We were using an old technology stack,” Sebastian says, noting that the new technology has enabled the retailer to “engage with our customers and form deeper relationships by creating new experiences where they have access to our stores.”

By shifting customers to the mobile app, Casey’s was able to integrate all digital and physical customer touchpoints into a single platform, Sebastian says. “We went to an API-led strategy.”

By having the app already in place, Casey’s was able to pivot rapidly when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Sebastian says. The company was able to prioritize no-contact deliveries, partner with a third-party delivery service, expand the merchandise available online, and launch a curbside delivery option.

Some customers in rural areas, accustomed to going to big-box stores every couple of weeks for their needs, started using Casey’s for fill-in trips. Additionally, the company continued to grow its pizza business, which Sebastian says ranks fifth nationally. Pizza cross-orders (e.g., wings with a pizza) grew significantly.

“More than 60 percent of our revenue comes from our mobile app, and more than 90 percent of our revenue comes from a mobile device, so we’ve really shifted our team to focus on mobile-first design and features and functionality,” Sebastian says. “We think it’s really important to be close to the customer, and the mobile app enables that. It allows our customers to order with speed. Simple things like recent order history, saved credit card or payment information, or saved addresses increase the ease of our mobile app.”

Casey’s used the SAP solutions to support a loyalty program launched about a year ago. The program has already signed up 3 million members. Loyalty program and customer order history data is helping the company better personalize customer offers.

“Identity management helps us know our customers and get closer to them,” Sebastian says. “Storing things like their preferences and other information helps us personalize that experience. Working with SAP and having the Customer Data Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Business One experience enables the unification of that experience, and we’re able to tie customer data along with the commerce experience all in one.”

FUTURE PLANS

“We’ve had an amazing journey over the past year or so with our partnership with Deloitte Digital and SAP,” Sebastian says proudly. “What was great was leveraging the best that every company could bring to the project. Bringing the expertise of integrating systems and building APIs as well as the knowledge of the platform and the infrastructure together really helped us build an amazing e-commerce site and app in record speed.”

Based on the success it’s had so far, Casey’s plans to deepen customer relationships by building out its identity management and personalization features to help better recognize customers and their preferences. 

The Payoff

Since implementing the SAP e-commerce solutions, Casey's has been able to do the following:

• integrate all digital and physical customer touchpoints into a single platform;
• surpass 3 million loyalty program members in just one year;
• increase pizza orders by as much as 30 percent; and
• grow digital orders to 15 percent more than phone-in orders.