Case Study
Mobile Convenience, Reimagined
Upgrading and enhancing the Kum & Go mobile app to bring ordering, payment, and loyalty into one seamless experience.
Kum & Go has been a staple of the midwest convenience landscape since 1959. Known for rethinking the whole convenience experience, Kum & Go meets customers where they are and offers all of the choices they deserve. To maintain that gold standard they are always looking for ways to modernize their offerings and keep pace with changing customer preferences. As part of their ongoing evolution, they turned to Orium to support the launch of a new digital experience that would enable a host of customer-centric features for their on-the-go consumers. From new promotion and loyalty capabilities to better merchandising and platform management, the new omnichannel Kum & Go experience was created with modern consumer needs at the core.
Apps & Mobile: Food & Beverage
Winner - Web Excellence Award
Apps & Mobile: Shopping
Winner - Web Excellence Award
The Challenge
Founded on the ideals of helping people get what they need and get moving, Kum & Go serves customers who are, as the name suggests, on the go. In 2022, they saw an opportunity to reimagine what “convenient” could mean for their clientele by creating a digital experience that would make shopping easier and more enjoyable. With groceries, gas, and so much more, Kum & Go has always been more than a convenience store, and an upgraded mobile app would give customers more of what they desire and continue to elevate Kum & Go to a category all their own.
They had a big list of improvements—enhanced search and merchandising experiences, built in customer value-adds through a new loyalty program, and better support modern shopping preferences—but alongside the updates for today’s customers, they knew the application would need to flex with the times and be easy to update as needs continued to shift in the years to come. And all of this needed to happen without downtime or disruption that might inconvenience the customers that already rely on their stores every day for fast, friendly service.
The Strategy
To achieve their goals, Kum & Go turned to Orium’s team of composable commerce specialists to implement a flexible, scalable new platform that would achieve four goals:
Control over digital experience
Kum & Go had been operating on a legacy solution that was limiting the amount of direct control they had over their own digital experience. The first objective was to put control back in their hands and enable ownership of search, merchandising, promotions, loyalty, and content so they could build the experiences their customers wanted.
Increased customer engagement
The convenience store audience has typically been thought of as a convenience-first group, choosing the option easiest/closest/fastest over everything else. Kum & Go knew that with a robust loyalty program, they could engage a larger segment of the consumer base who would make a small detour for big rewards. Launching a new loyalty program was a cornerstone of their digital strategy for this phase.
More in-store purchases
For many convenience store customers, fuel is the primary focus. In an effort to drive more value for their customers, Kum & Go has steadily upgraded their in-store offerings over the past several years — adding new products and fresh food — to provide a more comprehensive one-stop-shop experience. As part of their digital transformation, they wanted to upgrade their omnichannel experience to match their improved in-store offerings and make it easier for customers to purchase what they need in a single stop.
Extensible and maintainable platform
The backbone to any successful digital strategy is a robust technical framework. Kum & Go wanted to move off of their legacy platform, which was operating at an elevated cost while limiting their ability to innovate and create experiences customers wanted. To reduce dependencies on volume of custom services and increase visibility around customer behavior and platform performance, Orium worked with them to select and implement the best-of-breed composable commerce solutions they needed.
To achieve these four targets, Orium would work with the Kum & Go team to create and implement the road map that would give them the content control, platform flexibility, and loyalty enablement that would meet their needs.
Our goal is to deliver a best-in-class experience for our customers. Orium has enabled us to do that, rebuilding the foundations of our mobile app and rewards program on composable commerce, which gives us the flexibility and scalability to add, change, and improve our offerings for years to come.
The Solution
The planned mobile app and &Rewards program updates would constitute the biggest upgrade for the Kum & Go app since its launch in 2016. To ensure success at that scale, Orium worked closely with their team to consider every detail and create a plan that would produce the results they were after.
To start, the teams evaluated Kum & Go’s pain points and most pressing needs. With three primary areas of focus—ongoing content management, launching a new loyalty program, and building greater flexibility and extensibility into the platform—Orium worked with Kum & Go to identify the composable commerce vendors that would best meet their needs.
The first place the team started was resetting the foundations of the mobile app with a more cost-effective, future-ready, and developer-friendly React Native framework. To deliver a faster time to value, Orium and Kum & Go partnered to build out Orium’s React Native Accelerator, which combines proven frontend architecture conventions, a commerce-oriented UI library, and out-of-the-box support for the best-in-class technologies Kum & Go needed to gain control over content and create a compelling loyalty experience. Optimizing for both iOS and Android, the move to React Native and use of Orium’s Accelerator bridges the gap between platforms, creating a consistent user experience across platforms.
To provide Kum & Go with the content management they needed, Orium implemented Contentful’s composable content platform. This gave their team complete control over the content with little — and in most cases no — code required to make changes, updates, or other modifications to app content. Rounding out their content management capabilities Orium also implemented Typesense for Kum & Go, which provided the search and product index capabilities they needed to surface product recommendations and support personalized content delivery to their customers.
Loyalty was a key part of the experience upgrades Kum & Go wanted, and after evaluating the competitive vendor landscape, they selected Paytronix to bring the loyalty program they wanted to life. Paytronix has an incredibly robust offering that spans loyalty, promotions, and ordering, which gives Kum & Go not only a highly engaging loyalty program, but also the ability to flex and extend their services and offers in a number of ways.
With the Paytronix ordering functionality, Kum & Go is able to make the most of their fresh food options. Managing food orders is a complicated business. Differences between store and kitchen opening times, different menus for different times of day, and giving customers the ability to customize their items add layers of complexity to the experience, and each of them is crucial to delivering on the promise of reliability and convenience. Having a seamlessly integrated solution for ordering was one of the most important pieces of the overall CX puzzle.
By integrating with P97, the leading pay-at-the-pump vendor, Kum & Go is able to put customers in the driver’s seat. Whether that’s redeeming points for in-store products or getting a discount on fuel at the pump, customers can choose the reward they want. Additional upgrades to Mobile Fuel Pay were also made with P97, so customers can prepay for gas at set amounts, putting more control in their hands.
With an overhauled mobile app experience rooted in the customer experience, Kum & Go now has the control, flexibility, and interoperability to meet the next stage of commerce experiences.
Outcome & Next Steps
The new Kum & Go mobile app launched with a revamped rewards program and an overhauled, feature-rich ecommerce experience. Kum & Go’s &Rewards program has a new look and feel, and more importantly, rewards customers in the ways they want with new options for how to convert and use points for loyalty program members.
The mobile app now features a more personalized interface, with the ability to select a home Kum & Go location and new features, like recommendations based on customer history. Kum & Go’s Mobile Fuel Pay has updated features, too, including the ability to prepay for gas in pre-selected increments.
Even with all the enhancements launched, Kum & Go has big plans: further enhancements to the mobile app to keep driving value for customers, and a redesign of the web experience to match the new and improved mobile app are next on the agenda.
