How 20+ Years With Intouch Insight Helped Wawa Refine the Customer Experience Across 1,200+ Stores

Curious how Wawa’s long-standing partnership with Intouch Insight helped bring multiple CX programs into one ecosystem, sharpen decisions, and improve experiences across an expanding network?

Dive into the full story by watching the video below, or keep reading to discover more details.

About Wawa

Wawa is a family-owned American chain of convenience stores and gas stations with more than 1,200 stores across 14 states. Its purpose goes beyond filling orders. Wawa is in the business of fulfilling lives, creating connections that matter to customers, associates, and the communities each store serves. Keeping that promise consistent takes visibility into every location in real time.

The Challenge: Being Everywhere at Once

Despite running more than 1,200 stores under a single brand, Wawa knows that each one has its own story. The hard part is finding a way to hear them all.

Uncovering those stories required complete visibility into each store location. Were associates consistently meeting internal standards? What were customers experiencing?

Wawa wanted to separate meaningful patterns from the noise, and turn trending data into better decisions.

“Intouch Insight has given us trend data that helps us make better decisions as an organization and ensure that we are meeting the needs of our customers.” — Corinne Shinnick, Manager of Continuous Improvement, Wawa

What began more than 20 years ago as a focused mystery shopping and age compliance initiative has evolved into a multi-program partnership spanning Wawa’s entire footprint.

The Solution: Two Sides of the Store, One Picture

In Intouch Insight, Wawa found a partner capable of operating at massive scale. But the value of working with Intouch Insight isn't just from having more data. Intouch Insight delivers value by giving Wawa a holistic view of what’s happening across every store and turning that insight into actionable information for the managers who can make a difference.

Two sources provide this data:

1. Mystery shoppers visit every store on a frequent basis to objectively evaluate service standards.

2. Wawa gathers customer feedback at scale through its Voice of the Customer program.

Area managers and store leaders drill into aligned survey and mystery shop data down to the specific shift and time of day, allowing them to pinpoint operational opportunities, address missed interactions between store staff and customers, and make immediate adjustments locally. Meanwhile, regional teams spot organizational trends and modify strategy based on the information in front of them.

“The data provided by Intouch Insight is actionable at all levels.” — Corinne Shinnick, Manager of Continuous Improvement, Wawa

Wawa’s age-restricted sales program, also managed through Intouch Insight, helps ensure stores follow compliance requirements and provides the documentation Wawa needs to report to regulatory agencies.

Wawa’s needs don’t always fit neatly into a regular cadenced program, so the partnership is built to be flexible. The team works with Intouch Insight to launch ad hoc mystery shops when they need a fast read on a specific initiative, store area, or time of day.

“Intouch Insight has been able to pivot quickly as needed. They have long-term data that we're able to make decisions from, and we know that that data is good,” said Wawa Manager of Continuous Improvement Corinne Shinnick.

When Wawa launched fresh pizza, they used ad hoc mystery shopping to get rapid information about the customer experience. Was the pizza hot enough? Did the experience meet expectations? The feedback gave Wawa time to make adjustments during the rollout phase before they went live across the entire company.

That same flexibility came into play when Wawa transitioned its Voice of the Customer program from a legacy provider to Intouch Insight. The seamless migration of two years of historical data along with current inputs ensured zero break in data or trend analysis, making it easy for Wawa to continue building a long-term view of store performance.

The move gave Wawa the autonomy to change survey questions more quickly while consolidating platforms.

“There’s a huge benefit to having both our mystery shop and our Voice of the Customer programs on the same platform and in the same ecosystem,” Shinnick said. “Those two platforms allow us to mesh the data together to have a more holistic view of what’s happening in our stores and how we can provide the best experience to our customers.”

Still Moving Forward, 20 Years Later

As Wawa continues to expand its footprint, Intouch Insight will be there to help the team identify trends and uncover new customer experience data.

Through this partnership, Wawa knows that all the data they need will be at their fingertips, helping them answer questions, understand store performance, and make decisions at the local and organizational level.

“I would recommend Intouch Insight to other large-scale retailers, not only because of their commitment to excellence, but also because of the variety of insights that they're able to offer.” — Corinne Shinnick, Manager of Continuous Improvement, Wawa

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