Costa: Channel audit transforms internal communication strategy for coffee shop brand

Voted the nation’s favourite coffee shop brand for 12 years in a row, Costa employs more than 12,000 people across 2,300 stores in the UK. But Support Centre (HQ) employees had no way to communicate directly with the baristas engaging with customers and serving their products.

Instead, internal communication depended on a cascade process that relied on area and store managers to pass communications along. Employees described this approach as being “right out of the 1990s”.

Costa’s UK internal communications team asked Sequel to devise an audit to review the channel landscape and propose a new comms mix capable of meeting the needs of Costa’s growing business.

After meeting with the core IC team to agree objectives and a plan of action, we gathered qualitative and quantitative feedback from Costa employees.

From Bradford to Bristol, we travelled around the UK to ask store employees about communication at Costa. Which messages were getting through and what were they missing?

We also gathered feedback through interviews with 30 Support Centre employees and through an online, all-company survey – as part of which employees rated each channel individually, giving us a clear picture of their preferences.

We created a detailed report outlining emerging themes and making a number of recommendations based on the data and our best practice experience. It proposed a new channel mix using a powerful combination of employee engagement tools from the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

We presented our findings to IC stakeholders; first to the core team and then to their leadership. Afterwards, we helped our client prepare a business case by condensing our findings into a presentation for the Board.

The IC team took on board the recommendations, confident that the new platform for employee engagement and digital workplace transformation will revolutionise its communication.