Katie Petru and Mike Templeton, Casey’s

Good afternoon, good morning. It's Mark Johnson from the Loyalty 360. Everyone's happy, safe, and well. I want to welcome you back to another episode of our Loyalty 360 Leaders and Customer Loyalty series. In this series, we talk to the brand leaders about what they are seeing and hearing on the front lines of customer, channel, and brand loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with some great folks from Casey's, which is the third largest convenience retailer. We have Katie Petru, who's the Director of Communications and Community, along with Mike Templeton, who is the Director of Loyalty and Digital Marketing for Casey's, which has more than 2,300 stores. Thanks both of you for taking the time to talk to us today.

Yeah, excited to be here.

First off, we always like to start off to get to know the people who are interviewing on a more personal level. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and all that you do at Casey's, both of you? We can start with Katie.

Great. And what about you, Mike?

Yeah, so I lead our digital marketing and guest loyalty teams. Paramount to that is the Casey's Rewards program, the day-to-day operations of the loyalty platform, as well as all of the digital inputs that go into that, so the emails we send the guests, text messages, push notifications, and social engagement, which is a great way to keep folks engaged with the loyalty program.

Okay. Can you give us a short history of Casey's, all that you guys do? Most people may not be familiar because traditionally you've been more West Coast, I know you're rapidly coming to the East Coast. For those who may not know Casey's, what do you guys do and how do you do it?

Yeah, Casey's has been around for quite a while doing a lot of good things, having a good business serving guests in their communities. But the digital transformation probably started about two or three years ago, where the leadership team came to grips with the fact that the world is fast changing around us and we need to get caught up. Our guests are asking for it. So we met with a strategic partner to assess the situation. One of the things that came out of that was we've got to get going on loyalty. We see loyalty every day in our stores, but we don't have the program and the infrastructure underneath to be able to reward guests the way that we'd like and to understand what's happening so we can further affect behavior.

Absolutely. That said, I would love to know a little bit more about Casey's Rewards program, how it works, what you guys do with that, and the value you're extracting from the program.

Sure. We launched the Casey's app in 2019. We had been using a white-label solution before that had a button inside that clicked out to our website where you could order pizza, and that was part of that source of we've got to transform how we're operating here. So we hired several new folks into the team, we built a new app from the ground up, and made it easy for people to order pizza on the app. Quickly following that was the loyalty platform underneath it all. We launched Casey's Rewards in January 2020 with what you would say is a typical type of loyalty program: people earn points for the dollars they spend. They earn 10 points per dollar inside of the store and online, and they earn five points per gallon at the fuel pump. But some of the stuff that we brought that was new and different was that a lot of programs that would launch might only be in one channel, and we said our guests are looking to interact with Casey's everywhere. So whether you're at the pump, inside of the store, ordering in the app, or even calling the store over the phone, you should be able to earn all those ways. We brought all that stuff to market right at launch. The other thing that's unique is as people earn their points, they've actually got three different ways they can turn those into value for themselves. One is to turn them into Casey's Cash, which is the most popular option, cash that goes essentially back in their pocket that they can spend on the breakfast sandwich or the pizza they're going to order on Friday night. People can also turn their points into fuel discounts, which everyone loves to see that price roll back at the fuel pump after they put in their phone number. The third way is they can take their points and turn them into a donation to a local school. We've got on file about 36,000 schools from public and private K-12, where as people accumulate their points, they can turn that into a cash donation to a school, and we pay that out twice a year to help with supplies, projects, etc., putting that back to the hands of teachers and administration in ways they can use it to better their community.

That's awesome. When you look at some of the changes you made, you talked about the app, making the program more robust, going away from the white-label application. What changes have you made recently and what plans do you have to enhance it going forward?

Building that app from the ground up was huge for Casey's because we could put our guests at the center of it. We were no longer dependent on what features the vendor was providing to us; it was all about what the guest wants and how do we build to that. So we quickly spun up agile development teams to take in feedback, make adjustments, build out a new feature, launch it. A couple of the recent things we've added are challenges and referrals, which benefit the guests but have really helped enable our teams in marketing and loyalty to get more out of the program. The referrals is about what you'd expect: guests now have their own personalized invite code they can use to share with friends and family, and when those folks join the program, everybody wins, everybody gets points as a result of that. The challenges side is something that we've developed where we can actually create segmented, personalized incentives for different groups of people inside of the program. For example, if you stop into the store five times this week for coffee, here's what you could get as a result. Maybe somebody that's in every day looks a little bit different. Our ability to take those incentives, look at the behaviors we're trying to reinforce or grow for the business, we can customize those based on different guests right inside of the program.

Well, that's great. Community is a big piece of customer loyalty programs. Having that zero-party data, having that reciprocity, having that unique engagement opportunity is growing more and more important, especially with CCPA, CPRA, and other privacy regulations. It's great to hear what you guys are doing there. Partnerships are a big area of opportunity and a kind of advice for brands these days. I know you recently announced a sweepstakes to win a hometown concert with Lee Brice, great artist. Can you tell us about that promotion and the strategy behind it?

Absolutely. It's great to hear. He's a great artist. Where's the concert, by the way?

You've got to shop with rewards and earn those entries. That's the behavior and the opportunity we're driving to connect to the store and the transaction. When guests shop with rewards, they get another opportunity to have that hometown concert come to them. We'll know more in early September about where Lee is coming to play.

Okay, great. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing about that for sure. Maybe I can sneak in somehow, get a little favor. So, as we talk to brands, we have a large and growing brand community. We're very interested in how people and brands define different terms and what it means to them. Obviously, customer loyalty is at the heart of everything. What does customer loyalty mean to you and to your organization?

That's a great question, Mark. For me, when I think about loyalty, I see it as that unwavering commitment from a consumer to a brand. It's something that you're so passionate about you wouldn't make any other choice. You can see behind me, I have one of my favorite brands in the background. You couldn't give me any other energy drink and ask me to drink it, unless we were in a joint business plan meeting or something, then I'd be happy to on behalf of our partner. But aspirationally, I think our business holds that same view of loyalty. But there's also got to be a sense of realism there. We know we're in the convenience business. People are generally going to go where it's convenient for them. That is our opportunity as we look at the incentives we provide to guests, the benefits inside of our program, and just the experience that our team members deliver inside of the store. All of those things build towards this opportunity to foster loyalty from guests, which then translates transactionally inside of the program but also emotionally into how they feel about Casey's and our brand and what we mean to them.

Right. Well, I think one thing that's obviously very unique about your brand is that most convenience retailers have a relationship with the fuel and the brand itself. You have that integrated experience, like some of the others, where you can have that great customer experience and drive things that other brands can't. Some legacy providers have a convenience store that's not integrated with a brand, so it makes it hard to do some things. You guys have great customer experience, you've focused on great products and great offerings, and that really helps drive that passion internally. Having that connected experience is important as well. So when you look at customer loyalty, you talked about how you're using the app to buy pizza, it's definitely evolving beyond transactions. What other methods do you use to engage and reward customers? We heard about the Lee Brice offering. What are some other things that you guys do to engage your audience?

One of the things that's powerful about building the app ourselves and running and operating the program is that we can customize it in whatever way that we need to deliver on that value for the guest. One of the things that we've really taken heart to is all of these national day celebrations. Because we operate in so many businesses—we're the pizza restaurant, we're the coffee shop, we're the gas station, we're the place to stop and pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread—we have a lot of those opportunities where Casey's is relevant to our guests every day. Whether that's things like National Donut Day or National Coffee Day, we'll offer things where members can just come in and get a free donut or a free cup of coffee simply by being a member inside of the program. We've asked them to sign up and they've got to enter their phone number or scan their app, but we just say we want to celebrate you and the day and our brand together. Those are great opportunities for people to come in and just get the benefit out of loyalty versus always being asked to do something before they get something.

That's awesome. Okay, what about technology? That's a huge area of challenge for our members. We have small side meetings where they talk about different technology they like or they don't like. Those who are viewed as a center of excellence are seeing more and more people build it in-house. Jersey Mike's, the interviews you do with those guys, they build everything in-house. You guys talk about the app and how you have more control of that, especially when you listen to your customers, it makes it very impactful. What are some of the challenges you see around technology and how do you guys address them?

Deploying technology for the benefit of the guests is what's at the core. We've all got roadmaps and wishes about what we want to enable and the new features and functionality that we want, but bringing it all back to what our guests are looking for out of the program or the experience and how we deliver on that is really key. We've even done things where, as the third largest convenience retailer in the United States, we actually have a user experience team here at Casey's who does things like talk to our guests, run focus groups, and do one-on-one interviews like this with our guests to say, 'What's your experience like? What could be made better about how you interact and engage with Casey's? How do you use the app? What's important to you in terms of how you're rewarded or what you're looking for from this relationship?' Always bringing our technology thoughts back to what's in it for the guests, what are we trying to do or deliver for them, that really simplifies a lot of those decisions. We know that that's what's going to make the guest experience better. It's got to be something that they're interested and engaged with in order for it to be successful, so we always try to bring it back to that.

Okay. Obviously you're putting the guests first. You talked about some of the opportunities in small towns. It's not just the community store, it's the pizza place, the local hangout, probably part of a Lee Brice song. That's very unique and it gets to personalization and understanding the audience and being able to engage them in a unique way. How are you as a brand looking to enhance your personalization efforts?

One of the things that this digital transformation and the introduction of the loyalty program infrastructure has enabled is for us to act on personalization. The biggest opportunity for us as we think about it is how do we deliver value in every guest interaction. That speaks beyond just technology. Our team members are personalizing the experience inside of the store when they bring up your items and have them on the counter ready to go for you because you come in every day at the same time. They don't need a loyalty program or any sort of technology to tell that; that's just what they know and experience because they know their regulars inside of a store. But as we then take that great experience person to person and say how do we use technology to scale that, how do we use the data that our guests are giving us and sharing with us with an expectation that it's going to turn into programs, offers, promotions that are personalized to them, that's our key opportunity. We dig in regularly about how do we deliver on that, how do we show guests how familiar they are to us, and use the technology and the platform underneath to even anticipate what it is that they're going to need or make recommendations that we know they're going to love. That's at the heart of how personalization comes to life in the context of our program and how we do business.

Okay, great. Partnerships, as we mentioned earlier, are more and more important. We see that going through COVID. Marketers and brands want to work with other brands that have alignment, that can have value and reciprocity. It's not necessarily being part of a telecom program where you're giving free five-dollar coupons to the telco, but we see it as a big area of interest, especially where there's alignment. How have you traditionally approached partnerships, and is that something you feel is going to have a larger focus and larger impact going forward?

One of the other unique positions that we're in is that we are a brand that has passionate fans around it, but we're also a brand that has many other brands within. When you think about soft drinks, energy drinks, coffee, candy, etc., all of these are billion-dollar brands out there that have their own fan bases. When we can find opportunities to put the Casey's brand with another power brand together and then unite that passion between those and get activation on both sides, that's a really powerful thing. We love finding opportunities like that and being able to work with our partners to reward our mutual guests in those situations.

Absolutely. You've talked about this a little bit. COVID had a huge impact on marketers, brands, and individuals. Customers changed a good deal during COVID, and they were changing before that. How do you feel your customers are changing, and how are you as a brand so focused on customer experience adapting to that change?

I think we think about it the same way that most people are seeing, hearing, and thinking about it. People are time-strapped, which means convenience is even more of a priority and an expectation. People's time at home and with their families has become even more precious. Throughout this time, people have realized how nice it is to have some of that time to themselves and with their families. People are also more conscious of all the ways they can get the stuff that they need. That's been our business for 60-plus years: we're right around the corner where you can get that thing. Now there are other ways, and people have become a lot more discerning of the tools and technologies and the ways that restaurants and retailers can get stuff to them. We've had to take all of that into account for ourselves to make sure that we're continuing to adapt our offering and how people access Casey's for the things that they need. Over the past year, like a lot of other retailers, we were fast to fast-track curbside and enable curbside pickup through the mobile app, or extend the ways that people could pay for things or earn points across those channels. We're constantly talking to guests about what their needs, desires, and wants were and being able to quickly react to that stuff to adapt so we can continue to serve them no matter the situation.

Right, that's awesome. Katie, any perspective on that since you run communications with the brand?

Okay, great. When you look at your customer experience and customer loyalty efforts, measurement can be a big challenge. We actually have a big metric study we're doing right now looking to get our arms around it for the industry. How do you guys look at KPIs, how do you look at measurement, how do you make sure things are working well?

We have a lot of things over here at Casey's that we look at and measure. We've got dashboards like the best of them. Some of the key performance indicators that we talk about roll up into some key areas. On a daily basis, we're talking about how many people are enrolling in the program, how many people are actively using the program, which could be using the app or actually making purchases, and then what's our participation rate at these different points of engagement. We measure everything from how many orders are placed with the loyalty account versus how many times somebody identifies themselves inside of the store, or are they still standing out in the cold in the dead of winter punching their phone number in at the fuel pump. Monitoring those types of things is helpful to give us a sense of the health of our program. Ultimately, if we're driving more guests to join, we're seeing them participate in store and online, and then observing these increases in frequency within the program over time, we sort of chalk all that up to success.

Okay, great. What's the next big thing for customer loyalty and customer experience, maybe for the industry or maybe what are some things that Casey's is looking at to drive that engagement and that experience?

When I think about the next big thing at Casey's, it comes back to the one thing that we're all about, which is to make life better for the communities and guests every day. There are a lot of retailers, a lot of restaurants, a lot of loyalty programs out there. What we find is that the bar for experience is being set by the guests in every new experience that they have. We're not just in competition with other convenience retailers; we're in competition with drug stores, mass merchants, restaurants, coffee chains, or mobile apps. The beauty of the first Uber ride that I ever took, where I didn't have to pull out a credit card because you exit the vehicle and it knows you're done and the driver gets paid, that's a magical experience, and people are now looking for that everywhere else. When we look at it through that lens from a Casey's perspective, we know those expectations are always being raised. We're continuing to look for ways that we can foster deeper relationships with our guests, finding ways to show how familiar they are to us, and the different opportunities that we can learn from what guests have shared, how we can bring that back to them in a relevant, timely way, and honestly just improve their experience with Casey's. We know that if the experience is a miss, it's very easy to go somewhere else, so we continue to ask ourselves about the ways we can deliver that better experience for the guests.

Okay, great. When you look at your offering, as I mentioned earlier, you guys are very unique. You have a very compelling in-store offering completely integrated, so a little different than some competitors. You mentioned a larger competitive set, which is true for most brands today as well. How do you think you are different from your competitors, and do you see similar efforts in the competitive set? What do you think sets you guys apart?

First for Casey's, our brand, we've been around for a long time, we operate at the heart of the communities that we're in. That alone sort of gives us permission to even earn people's loyalty in the first place. We see it every day in our stores. It is the place where the person running the register on the other side knows who you are, not just because you're in loyalty, but there are those personal relationships that exist there. It's the way you get your day started or that hello as somebody comes in. You just don't see that everywhere. That's part of the convenience experience; it's different for us, and the way Casey's delivers that stands out as a differentiator. As we take that now and try to extend it into things like the Casey's app and all these other digital types of experiences, our opportunity is to take that thing that they know and love about Casey's in a store environment and extend it into all the ways they interact with our brand.

That's great. Katie, any follow-up to that?

That's awesome. The last question I have for both of you: What can Loyalty 360 do to help you with your customer loyalty journey and your customer loyalty program?

I love experiences like this. I've watched a handful of them myself, and I think it's great to hear from the leaders inside the business that are driving these programs. We all think that we're very different, but a lot of our problems are all the same. It's great to hear how different people are tackling different situations. The other thing you mentioned earlier is some of these broader studies on key issues and being able to unpack that at an aggregate level. Those types of things are really helpful as we all aspire to build bigger, better, more loved programs. The more that we can learn from each other, I think guests will all benefit in the end.

Okay, great. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview. I'm going to go to the Casey's right around the corner and make sure I sign up and get some fuel there so I can hopefully get Lee Brice in Cincinnati. It was great talking to both of you. I think the passion you have for what you do and the passion you have for the program is great to hear. Not all brands and not all people involved in loyalty programs have that bigger picture of customer loyalty focus, but you really see that, and you guys are commendable in a number of ways. It's great to talk to both of you.

Yeah, thanks Mark. It's great to be here.

Absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening, and come back soon to check out another customer loyalty.