Smoother journeys and better services with the ABC-mobile application

Before having its own mobile application, the ABC chain had piloted mobile refueling as part of the S-mobiili app. Despite positive experiences, however, the number of people using the mobile refueling service did not grow at a sufficient pace. ABC identified a need for its own mobile application that would cater more extensively to the needs of customers using cars.

The successes and pain points that had emerged from the pilot were reviewed in user interviews conducted in the early stages of the project. Based on customer feedback and interviews, it was precisely the speed afforded by an own app and the possibility to pinpoint the user’s location at the ABC station they are at that would improve the customer experience. The app was developed with a strong focus on the smooth use of services.

ABC is one of Finland’s largest restaurant chains. While city dwellers use ABC stations as stopping points on their way to somewhere else, in smaller towns they are important clusters of restaurants and services.

When ABC piloted the food ordering service, the work began by creating a service concept based on customer wishes that would allow customers to order food in advance while on the road. The further development of the service was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, and thanks to its agile approach, S Group was able to add the take-away food ordering feature to the ABC-mobile app in record time.

"I'm proud of our team and the entire ABC chain for being able to transform the food ordering feature in ABC-mobile into a take-away model in less than a week. I remember being at my summer cabin heating the sauna on the Saturday before the Uusimaa Covid-19 lockdown would begin the following week. I was messaging with the chain director and the director of in-store operations about the possibility to accelerate the shift to the take-away model.

The work started immediately and we got the new model in six days! The following Friday, we had a radio advertising campaign running throughout the country in which we advertised the opportunity to order and pay for food in advance – and receive the order safely directly in the car. Parking spaces for picking up take-away orders were added to all ABC stations. We were able to sell 33,000 meals through ABC-mobile during the lockdown."

- Jussi Säilä, Chief Digital Officer, ABC chain

In addition to application development, the restaurant’s digital development project included the familiarisation of the staff with the new service and the construction of parking spaces for picking up orders at almost a hundred stations. Through ABC-mobile, customers can order and pay for their food in advance – and request it to be delivered directly to their car parked in a pick-up space. All ABC Restaurants’ menu items are available for mobile ordering, from à la carte dishes to pizzas and burgers.

The menu in the app is fully customisable and allows quick changes to be made – this is noteworthy in the case of a chain as large as ABC. Now the busiest travellers will no longer have to queue at the cash desk or wait for their food to be prepared.

When it comes to food orders, the role of the staff is significantly bigger compared to the other services in ABC-mobile. The advance ordering feature is primarily intended to make work easier and improve the employee experience. The development team tested the ordering process together with the restaurant staff. Now orders can be received at a more steady pace, which makes it easier to process them.

S Group and the ABC team’s ability to react to changes in an agile way is one of their key strengths. One example of this is the active dialogue with customers. In spring 2021, one of ABC’s customers shared on social media their wish to have the pizza delivered with an otherwise successful order pre-cut in the future. The ABC team thanked them for the suggestion and put the idea into practice in just a couple of days. Implementing even seemingly small changes in several dozen restaurants is challenging, but an agile organisation with a positive attitude towards change can succeed in it.

Most important for the ABC development team is a solution oriented approach. Instead of a single application, the team builds digital capabilities for ABC, preferably in a way that allows the entire S Group to benefit from this competence.

From the beginning, the solution architecture of the mobile app was implemented as a cloud-native serverless solution based on Amazon Web Services. In the early stages of the cooperation, all of this was something quite new to S Group, but they quickly realised the scalability and potential of the AWS cloud platform. The app itself was developed using React Native, which enabled a uniform implementation on Android and iOS platforms.

Payment features have played a key role in the application development. What makes the ABC-mobile app special is the amount of a one-time fuel sales purchase, which is in a completely different ballpark than in most apps. Compliance with the payment services directive PSD2 has added its own element to the development work and introduced bank specific differences to the implementation of mobile payments.

The directive aims to protect consumers against fraud and requires that banks must be able to request strong authentication for any payment transaction. The directive requires banks to carry out a risk assessment for every payment and, based on their analysis, decide whether or not strong authentication is required for the payment. This has made the user experience different for customers of different banks, and delivering an effortless user experience has been a delicate balancing act in the development work. The Bonus system, which is important for S group customers, also ties in with purchase process.

Identifying the user’s location is an integral part of the functionalities of the ABC-mobile app, which also makes it technically difficult to develop. Phones locate themselves using wi-fi networks, cell towers and GPS. When ABC-mobile was expanded to also cover electric charging, the typical location of charging points, i.e. parking halls, had to be taken into account in the development work.

The food ordering and electric charging features also required the possibility to send real-time status updates to provide the best possible user experience. The WebSocket implementation built for this purpose was also carried out as a serverless solution right from the start. At that time, the technology was still so new that it even prompted the people at AWS to ask for the development team’s experiences using it.