CASE STUDY

The client

Costa Coffee is a coffee franchise founded in London in 1971. The second-largest coffee chain in the world, it has over 3,400 stores across 31 countries and over 18,000 employees. 

The challenge

Costa was acquired by Whitbread in 1995 and subsequently purchased by The Coca-Cola Company in 2019. The Coca-Cola acquisition completely redefined Costa’s growth trajectory, putting the company on an ambitious accelerated path to global growth. 

However, in pursuing their objectives, they faced a crucial limitation: post-acquisition they found themselves without a central communications platform. Whitbread retained its own intranet in the sale and new owners Coca-Cola had not planned on integrating the company into their own internal communications. 

In order for Costa to reach its ambitious goals, it would need a way of connecting employees across the entire business and giving them the tools and infrastructure they need to communicate and collaborate at scale. 

As things stood, the business had been left with a number of key limitations on its capacity to facilitate connection and collaboration across the business, which would dampen the effectiveness of their business strategy. 

  • This meant that it was difficult to find out who was who within the organisation, to find information about what projects were underway or how the company was performing.

    New starters found it difficult to navigate the structure of the company and to find the people and resources they needed.

  • There was a disconnect between the back-office staff and the front-line workers who were interacting with the customers.

    The infrastructure was lacking to connect the baristas—who make up the majority of the company’s headcount—to the rest of the company through, for example, their own email address or intranet account.

    As a result, delivering a superb customer experience on the front lines was harder than it needed to be, with baristas trying to do their job with unreliable communications and limited opportunities to connect with peers in other branches and collaborate with colleagues elsewhere in the business.

  • With branches and regions cut off from each other, there were limited opportunities to share new innovations, ideas, and learnings and a lot of duplication of effort.

    Similarly, Costa HQ had no efficient way of getting feedback from the frontlines about the effectiveness of new campaigns that were devised in the head office. The innovation teams were cut off from the branches implementing their ideas.

    And when trying to break into unfamiliar global markets it's imperative to take on a startup mindset in that region. In that context, feedback is not a luxury, but a necessity!

Ultimately, by freeing these blocks to connection, collaboration and communication across the business, Costa would put themselves in a much better position to be able to realise their ambitious global growth plans. 

Costa knew that they needed a bold communications solution: a single source of truth for what is going on in the company and a reliable central platform for multi-directional communication between all members of the Costa family.

The solution

At Future Worx, our approach is relentlessly people-focused. We knew that Costa’s growth plans would succeed or fail on the basis of the employee experience they could provide.  

Accordingly, we devised a three-stage process to determine exactly what Costa’s people felt they needed, envision a solution to meet those needs, and then develop a rock-solid implementation roadmap. 

These three stages would clarify the why, what, and how of their new communications solution.  

  • The first few weeks of the project were dedicated to gathering information about the business and the employees to establish the big picture of what was going on within the business.

    The core of this phase was in-depth employee experience research. We conducted dozens of interviews with representatives from all areas of the business from the C-suite to the front line to collect their views and perspectives as well as assess what they felt they needed to do their jobs more effectively.

    We managed to boil down a huge amount of information into representative personas from all across the business and their typical challenges, hopes, needs, and ambitions. For each persona, we developed a typical ‘day in the life’, highlighting the communication challenges and needs of their role.

    Overall, this gave us a view of the different groups and tribes within the business and their needs, challenges and desires that would guide the development of the solution.

  • But how do you turn those high-level personas and needs into a technical solution?

    In the second phase, we played back the findings of our research to key stakeholders and started to narrow down and prioritise the requirements for the proposed solution.

    We held an in-depth, two-day envisioning workshop with key stakeholders and senior leadership to agree on a vision for the kind of employee experience that Costa wanted to create.

    We guided them through conceptualising exercises, design-thinking methods and discussions designed to clarify requirements, work through disagreements and build a sense of collective ownership around the project.

    The goal was to develop what we call a minimum loveable product (MLP). This is a product that is developed enough to have an immediate impact on the business but, at the same time, doesn’t cover every possible use case.

    By the end, we had transformed the list of employee needs into a crystal clear list of technical requirements that we knew the first ‘MLP’ would have to deliver and a list of requirements that would sit on the backlog for a later iteration.

  • Now Costa knew what they had to build, they just needed to clarify how.

    In the third phase, we developed a blueprint and roadmap to deliver Costa from the limits of their current communications setup to a bespoke solution that is designed to cater to the needs of everyone in the business: from the barista who joined last week to the CEO.

    Our final report included the following core elements:

    Key-value drivers for the employee hub

    A synthesis of the research phase highlighting the values that lie at the foundation of the new communications solution and how they align to the technical solution.

    Complete employee experience blueprint

    This blueprint detailed the current employee experience (EX) and demonstrated how incorporating new communications technologies would transform how employees experienced working at Costa and what the business benefits would be.

    Our user experience (UX) specialist built a user journey for each employee persona, showing how they work now and—drawing on the latest UX best practice—how specific interventions would be able to improve their EX.

    Strategy roadmap

    A timeline of the exact steps that Costa would need to take in order to make their vision a reality, including planning, implementation and adoption.

    Digital platform definition & technical vendor analysis

    We provided a clear definition of the core elements of the communications platform. Alongside, we put together a technical vendor analysis: based on what Costa are trying to achieve, we assessed the vendor landscape to determine which might be a good fit to implement the solution.

    Clickable prototype

    A usable prototype of the proposed solution so people could get a version of the solution in their hands. This is critical for demonstrating the art of the possible, really bringing the project to life, and also getting high-quality feedback.

The business
outcome

Costa found themselves between a rock and a hard place: they had been left without a communications solution, while needing to deliver on global growth plans. They knew they needed a solution but were unclear on what their people needed or how they would make that a reality.

Future Worx has helped them do three things:

  • When we began the project, Costa was not aware of the exact challenges and difficulties their people were facing across the business.

    By gathering and synthesising opinions and perspectives from across the whole business we were able to paint a clear picture of those needs and develop a consensus on a technical solution that would meet those needs.

  • By including employees from all areas of the business and working through stakeholder concerns in workshops, we were able to generate a real sense of ownership and enthusiasm behind the project.

    Through the envisioning process, carefully answering concerns and objections, and understanding people’s different needs and motivations, we were able to build a sense of anticipation and excitement that is crucial to the successful adoption of new solutions.

  • Costa now has a clear vision for their solution, a detailed roadmap for getting there, and a list of the various vendors who will be able to get them there.

    The next step will be for them to put together an RFP and put it out for tender to the various prospective vendors.

The new communications solution will be a critical step for Costa in reconnecting people from all over the business. 

It will help people from all over the business be able to find the information they need, discover who is who within the business, gain wider recognition for their work, collaborate with colleagues in other branches, and personalise their own communications feed. In short, it will empower Costa’s people — whether on the front lines or in the back office— to excel at their role in a digital world. 

The business will be reconnected at the level of the individual, the branch, the department, and even the country, laying the foundation for a coffee business capable of thriving in the global marketplace.