The UK’s largest coffee chain, Costa Coffee has partnered with Cloud and Digital service provider, ANS Group to lay the foundations to support their global expansion strategy and improve their customer engagement and loyalty using tablets, the Costa Coffee apps and Costa express machines.
This partnership will see ANS migrate Costa’s key systems into the AWS cloud, helping to increase the flexibility and efficiency to enable them to reach into international markets while improving customer experience and brand loyalty across their 2,467 stores and Express machines.
Earlier this year, Costa was acquired by Coca-Cola which has given the organisation the opportunity to leverage Coca-Cola’s production and distribution capabilities. Costa already operates across 31 counties but now plans to reach into new markets.
Commenting on the organisation’s growth strategy, Phil Scully, CIO at Costa Coffee said: “the acquisition by Coca-Cola has shifted our horizons significantly and we now have to be far more agile in terms of getting into markets that are further away. The acquisition has brought that global scale and global pace to the forefront our expansion strategy, but we still need to maintain the operational efficiency and operation tooling that will manage our business and capacity planning which is a bigger part of our agenda as we go forward.
We decided to partner with ANS to deliver our ambitious cloud strategy because they demonstrated such strong service maturity and tooling. Their organisational structure provided us with the confidence we needed to consistently feel supported and we look forward to working closely with ANS to optimise and manage our cloud environment as we continue to scale globally.”
Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS added, “We are absolutely delighted to be working with such an ambitious and creative digital business that operates in a fast-paced market. This project will enable Costa Coffee to lay the foundation to not only expand, but to improve the way they interact and engage with their customers via tablets, apps and their service machines. Coffee is one of the fastest growing beverage segments in the world, with sales increasing by 6% in the past 12 months alone so it’s great to see Costa driving forward on their cloud first strategy to ensure they have the agility they need to succeed and grow into the world’s largest coffee chain.”