From digital rewards to daily relevance
A leading energy and retail group in Thailand launched an app to digitise its loyalty program, letting customers earn points, redeem rewards, buy coupons, and pay with an e-wallet. After several years in market, adoption was lower than expected and the app had not yet earned a clear role in customers’ daily routines.
We were brought in to define the strategy for the next five years. Through research and experimentation, we realised the app needed to move beyond discounts and become a connected ecosystem that offered real convenience across fueling, cafés, and other services. This shift reframed the product from a transactional rewards app into a platform designed for daily engagement and long-term growth.
Project Deep Dive
Challenge: A loyalty app without loyalty
Early audits and customer research showed that disengagement wasn’t only due to design issues. The app simply wasn’t built around real customer needs. There was a clear mismatch between what users valued and what the business was offering, leading to low adoption despite a wide set of features.
Our goal was to move beyond short-term transactions and build lasting engagement. We set out to reconnect the app to real customer behaviours and needs, create tangible value in everyday moments, and establish a five-year vision that balanced business growth with user relevance.
Start with behaviour, scale with insight
We travelled across Thailand’s urban and suburban provinces to meet customers where they live, work, and refuel. Through ethnographic research and interviews, we learned what convenience meant to them and how the app fit into their daily routines.
We found that the app hadn’t yet earned a meaningful place in their journey. Customers could still collect points over the counter and preferred their existing payment methods, leaving little reason to switch to the app.
Reframe the value proposition
Through a series of co-working sessions, we shifted the focus from discounts to convenience, connection, and personal relevance. The app’s new role became clear: make everyday experiences across the ecosystem faster, easier, and more personal.
We also decided to prioritise customers of their fuel and lifestyle cafe businesses to start with as this was their largest and highest frequency customers. Representing the biggest opportunity to the business.
Lean experiments to prove convenience drives adoption
We focused on fueling rather than cafés, where pre-ordering was already an established customer use case. Field observations showed that drivers were highly consistent in their refuelling habits, which revealed a clear opportunity to simplify the process through digital ordering.
We prototyped a refuelling feature that let drivers experience placing their usual fuel order and paying directly through an app. In live field tests with station staff and drivers, most participants completed the flow with minimal guidance and we achieved an 80% satisfaction score. This gave us confidence that convenience was a strong lever for adoption and could also meaningfully reduce wait times at stations.
We also tested a cross-selling feature that allowed users to order from station cafés while refuelling. This experiment yielded insights that shaped the ordering and fulfilment experience design, while demonstrating a clear opportunity to increase average order value per visit.
