Greggs keeps the morning coffee ritual safe and easy with Azure Active Directory External Identities

People everywhere in the world look forward to starting the day on a positive note. Greggs offers delicious, fast, great-value breakfasts, a variety of popular coffee drinks and teas, and healthy meal solutions and snacks for later in the day. With its promise to make great-tasting, freshly prepared food accessible to everyone, it’s no wonder that the food-to-go retailer is one of the nation’s favorites. The largest employer in the northeast of England, Greggs is also a significant benefactor. Its Greggs Foundation ensures that more than 45,000 deprived children start the school day with a tasty breakfast.

The COVID-19 pandemic might have put an abrupt end to all of this and, indeed, Greggs closed its shops briefly. But thanks to the company’s estate resilience, ingenuity, and talented IT team, Greggs is now open for business and thriving. Its mobile app and website (hosted on Microsoft Azure) use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) External Identities to power its Click + Collect feature, giving customers a safe, easy way to order and pick up the food that they enjoy.

Racing ahead to serve the food industry with an omnichannel experience

When we think of our favorite comfort foods, the inviting fragrance from a warm oven naturally springs to mind. The companies supplying that goodness have had to leaven their product with a dose of technology innovation, due to a new age of consumer convenience coupled with the physical barriers of the pandemic. “We have reshaped how we see technology in our company in the last five years,” says Tim Fieldsend, Lead Digital Architect at Greggs. He describes a landscape of systems that weren’t fully integrated, including many point solutions and those outsourced to third parties.

“Multiple systems meant that our customers couldn’t use the same account across all of our systems,” he continues. “As part of our mission to be the customers’ favorite for food on-the-go, we’re aspiring to break new ground and deliver an industry-leading digital experience that complements and enhances our in-store experience.”

According to Geraint Evans, Head of Digital at Greggs, the pandemic coincided with growing consumer demand for convenience. “Clearly all industry sectors and all verticals are investing heavily in digital,” he muses. “Customers demand new experiences that are slicker and, ideally, friction-free. That high degree of engagement with our customers is a key driver for us, and it helps us understand and deliver what they want from Greggs so that they enjoy interacting with us as a brand.”

Baking convenience and safety into customer interactions 

During the pandemic, Greggs decided to reopen shops in a safe, minimal-contact way. Adding the Click + Collect capability, already in the works in response to customers’ need for greater convenience, to its Greggs app was key. Greggs already offered customers a full range of digital experiences—a loyalty program accessible through its Greggs mobile and web apps, a shop finder, and more. So there was a strong need to add the Click + Collect capability for customer convenience, and connecting its services to provide a seamless, secure customer experience was top priority.

Deploying Azure AD External Identities was a rewarding experience. “We felt that we were being heard from day one when working with Microsoft and Azure Active Directory External Identities,” recalls Ryan Morrin, Lead Software Developer at Greggs. “Microsoft engineers worked with us to realize our customer-centric vision for data migration flows. We didn’t have to struggle against a rigid, preexisting framework.” He was pleased with the ability to tailor the Greggs app with Microsoft technologies. “We’ve customized the look and feel of the Greggs app with Azure AD External Identities,” he adds. “Introducing different flows and conditional statements to change the interface as we want to is very easy.”

Fieldsend expands on the team’s requirements: “We wanted a lot of flexibility to use different tools for multifactor authentication and a range of SMS providers so that we could deeply customize the customer experience, making it seamless. The goal was for it to feel native regardless of the platform, like all of our digital experiences.” He expands, “Azure AD External Identities was the best choice for our complex migration. It offers fantastic value—besides being flexible and powerful tooling, it’s very cost-effective.”

Greggs is adamant that security is essential to the best possible customer experience. As the threat landscape has vastly evolved and grown over recent years, so has the use of online payment activity. The Greggs app facilitates payment at the point of checkout for both digital and in-store purchases, so the team puts security features with Azure Active Directory, like risk detection in Azure AD Identity Protection, to work to safeguard their customers’ data. “Security is at the forefront of everything we do,” says Morrin. “Our biggest safety concern is always protecting customer data from malicious actors. We use the risk detection feature in Azure AD Identity Protection to instantly lock out any suspicious customer accounts it flags.” The team is also beginning to roll out Conditional Access policies in Azure Active Directory.

Putting a seamless experience—and a scrumptious meal—in the hands of customers

Using Azure AD External Identities simplifies workflows for the Greggs IT team even as it enhances customer experience. Case in point is the multifactor authentication for the Greggs app. The team turned the authentication method on with the previous provider. The sign-up flow in the app needs the customer to provide their mobile number, which Greggs later uses as part of multifactor authentication to complete the sign-in process. “We used Azure AD External Identities to securely access customer mobile device number data to enhance the login process,” explains Morrin.

Greggs’s vision of a free-flowing customer experience between digital and physical worlds unfolds on thousands of customer mobile devices every day with just a couple of clicks. “Our customers can walk into a shop and scan a QR code on their Greggs app to earn or spend rewards or make their purchase online,” enthuses Fieldsend. “You can spend rewards earned digitally in a physical shop and vice versa. It’s a seamless omnichannel customer experience.”

The company faces the future with confidence, as the Click + Collect capability has been scaled up from 100 original stores to more than 2,000. “The pandemic ignited an ongoing atmosphere of change in the digital world,” says Evans. “We’ve invested in world-class talent at Greggs. The other part of our strategy to lead in our industry is forming close ties with a technology company that can support us through a time of accelerating change and help us achieve our innovation ambitions, even with millions of customer identities to protect. That’s why we appreciate Microsoft.”

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