Bartosz: Hi, welcome to another episode of the Euvic Talks podcast, where we connect business and technology — and today that connection will be really tangible, because we’re going to talk about Phygital. My guest is someone I have a genuinely sentimental feeling toward, because — I don’t know if you’ll share this view — but my professional career definitely picked up pace from our joint venture. My guest is Krzysiek Heyda. Hi, Krzysiek.

Krzysztof: Hi, great to be here.

Bartosz: Krzysiek, to start, I’d like to ask you to walk us through your business journey, because some big, well-known brands show up there — we have Tauron, we have Żabka, we have Modivo. How did your path unfold?

Krzysztof: That’s right. I generally consider myself a product manager by profession — someone who creates digital products. It actually came about somewhat by accident, because I started out in marketing, and then at some point an opportunity came up to build a first app — it was at Sizer, Sizer Up — and I just got hooked on that world, mainly apps. Later, in parallel, came the Phygital side. The jewel in my crown when it comes to apps is Żabka, which everyone probably knows — 10–12 million users, 11,000 stores. It’s a great loyalty app that’s really achieving tremendous success. We also built the Mój Tauron app, which is definitely unique in the energy sector and I hope will get even better. And those phygital elements — that blending of the physical and digital worlds — I had many opportunities to work on at eobuwie Modivo. There I was responsible, together with a team, for all the consumer technologies that allowed you to order shoes within a physical store: tablets, a system for notifying you when your order is ready, and virtual fitting rooms — the entire physical-digital experience in Modivo and eobuwie stores. Plus, I’d worked on a similar element earlier at Sizer, where there was a network of touchscreens where you could do various interesting things.

Bartosz: So a whole ecosystem designed to increase customer conversion?

Krzysztof: Exactly — it’s a way of implementing omnichannel in the broad sense.

Bartosz: Right. Could you explain to our viewers and listeners what Phygital is, and whether we can put an equals sign between Omnichannel and Phygital, or not quite?

Krzysztof: Sure. So, Phygital — as I already touched on — the word itself comes from two words: “physical” and “digital,” hence Phygital — the merging of the real world with the digital one. Examples are kiosks that everyone knows from McDonald’s, and a mobile app in certain contexts can also be this kind of solution. So that’s Phygital. And does it equal Omnichannel? Not exactly — I think it’s a version of or a complement to Omnichannel. Omnichannel is the broader concept talking about connecting channels, while Phygital has become one of those channels, bridging the physical and digital worlds.

Bartosz: Okay. How do you organize responsibilities so that an omnichannel project doesn’t fall apart due to departmental divides — so that it all plays together and builds value for the business?

Krzysztof: That’s a huge challenge. And it still is to this day, because omnichannel isn’t something I’m talking about as a brand new concept — it’s been discussed for about 10 years. When various channels were emerging, we started with multichannel, which focused on many touchpoints but still lived in silos. Now we’re trying to connect them. And to do that, the most important element in my view is data. In the multichannel era, we looked at how each channel performed individually — the business question was something like: what revenue did my mobile app bring in? But in omnichannel, we look more at the user’s journey across those various channels. The business question becomes: how did a visit to the mobile app contribute to a purchase in a physical store? So we look at the transitions between channels. That requires shared data — to be able to capture that user journey across different touchpoints. But collecting the data is only the first step; you then need to be able to draw the right conclusions from it, which is another challenge that many organizations still face: shared analytics that from one place can extract data relevant to each of those business divisions.

And what I often see as another obstacle in omnichannel is the business goals set for individual channels. Very often those goals end up fighting each other — there’s a separate sales target for the retail network and a separate one for the mobile app or e-commerce of the same company. Instead of jointly guiding the customer toward a purchase, they’re competing for the same customer. So even if the mobile app offers the option to place an order for in-store pickup, the app owner would still rather have the customer buy within the app. And similarly in the store — instead of redirecting the customer to the app, they’d rather say “order here and it’ll arrive in 3 days.” These inconsistent goals, especially in large retail organizations, often end up cannibalizing each other rather than being mutually supportive.

Bartosz: So this also requires a kind of shift, a change in organizational culture, to build the awareness that channels don’t compete with each other — that we’re all playing toward the same goal. How do you achieve that?

Krzysztof: My practical experience so far shows that it’s hard. It really is a very significant shift at a very high level within the company. I understand the need to track the performance of specific channels and to maintain oversight — and when you somewhat abandon that way of setting goals, you lose a degree of control. That creates a certain mental barrier. I can’t offer a simple answer here. I haven’t yet seen an ideal place, at least from my own practice, where it actually works without some degree of channel competition.

Bartosz: You refer to data. It’s really great when an organization is mature enough to actually use that data and work with certain metrics. And I’m curious — in today’s world, where everyone (myself included) keeps talking about AI — have you used AI in your career to do something meaningful with that data?

Krzysztof: Definitely. That’s exactly what we’re working on now and figuring out at Tauron, which generates enormous amounts of data — it’s a company with over 6 million customers, a massive organization, everyone uses electricity, there are countless touchpoints, and we have a very large volume of data but completely unstructured. So we’re exploring whether AI can help us organize that data, so that later another AI can actually use it in an authorized way — that’s certainly one example of how AI can be applied. Because data really is the foundation of everything — and it has been for a long time, not just now — it should be the foundation of everything in every company. That data will be what any other AI working in the back office relies on to actually function. It’s a complete basic.

Bartosz: Do you see any common ground between companies like Tauron and more retail-oriented companies like Modivo? Did you carry experiences from building Mój Tauron into your work for Modivo?

Krzysztof: The common ground is enormous — and it’s the customer. My entire career has almost always been about customers — B2C customers. Whether it’s energy, which is generally boring for the customer (let’s be honest — as long as the power works and the bills aren’t too high, you don’t pay much attention to your energy company), or in e-tail — it’s the same customer. That’s why, especially in energy companies, we should look at how experiences are being created. If we want to do something really great, we should take best practices from retail — how apps work, not just retail apps but food delivery apps, Uber, and so on — and transfer that experience and that way of operating to our dull energy tools, so that for the customer they’re understandable and the experience feels very familiar.

That’s the enormous common ground — the customer. Because you often see in various projects that we think about the customer in a siloed way, as if they only existed in our world. But they live in completely different places too. They interact with other companies and build experiences there. So very often there’s no point reinventing the wheel. I’m a big fan — regardless of which industry you’re working in — of looking at other industries to see how they handle certain processes. Because when we create digital products, we very rarely create something from absolute scratch. It may be from scratch for our company, but not from scratch in the world — someone else has done it somewhere else. The idea isn’t to copy solutions, but to be inspired by them and create a similar experience — so that when a customer comes to us, even if it’s their very first time, they immediately think: “Okay, I know how this works, I know what to click, I know what’s happening.”

Bartosz: Tell me — what was the most interesting part of all this, what was new to you, and where were the challenges in building what has become what I’d call an iconic digital product?

Krzysztof: The most interesting part and simultaneously the biggest challenge was scale. As I mentioned, Żabka now has about 11,000 stores — at the time it probably had around 7–8,000, because it was growing at an astronomical pace. I wasn’t there from the very beginning, but I joined the company before the app was publicly released. And a big challenge — not just for me but for Żabka as a company — was that this was the first product of this kind they were building. If you think of Żabka as a company today, they have a whole range of digital products: the Żabka app, Yumy, Delio, and they recently launched the Impuls platform which allows sales data to be used and sold to B2B customers. So now they’re a giant in technology. Back then, Żabka was primarily associated with stores — and mainly with alcohol and cigarettes, honestly. I was one of those people who laughed when I said I was going to work at Żabka, joking that I’d be standing behind a counter selling booze and cigarettes. That was Żabka’s image back then.

For the people above me — because I was the app owner, but there were several layers of management above me — the challenge was creating a structure capable of actually delivering the app. And that structure was quite unique. Now things look different, because the Żabka app is now run by Żabka’s marketing team. But back then, a structure was created around the application that wasn’t just strictly product-oriented — product owners, analysts, UX designers — but also a full set of business competencies around the app: people dedicated solely to the app’s offering, people dedicated solely to the app’s marketing, people for customer service. So it became a company within a company, where every competency was represented somewhat autonomously within the Żabka project. That created a startup-like atmosphere, which also allowed us to deliver things in a dynamic way with fast decision-making.

As I said — scale was both the most exciting and the most challenging part. It was also where we stumbled early on: the app launched quickly, was very well prepared — and I don’t just mean technically, but also in terms of communication — so it quickly gained significant popularity among young people. There were moments when things crashed because servers went down, traffic was too high, some promotion was too good. Those became “national problems” at some point. But that scale was also very rewarding — it’s still nice to walk into a Żabka today, even several years after I stopped having direct contact with it, and see people using it. Full stop.

And on the topic of the Super App approach — we were talking about a Super App almost from the beginning. We also had conversations with companies from Asia that had already done something like that, as a kind of benchmark. A true Super App at Żabka really took shape about a year ago, when they added various types of tickets, travel insurance and so on — it really became a proper Super App. But I had the opportunity to lay some of the groundwork for that — for example Żabka Pay, which is in-store payments using the app in a physical store. That’s now the backbone of, among other things, Żabka Nano, the autonomous store, and Żabka Post, the entire order pickup system. So it was a really exciting experience — there truly was no two days the same. We weren’t just building features for collecting Żabsy points — suddenly you’d have to dive deep into payments, or postal services, or various other aspects. It was great.

Bartosz: So did Żabka’s stores also become a kind of laboratory for experiments? Because it sounds like you were turning a local convenience store into a place where a customer like me can get a lot more done than just buy rice and flour. Going back to my question — were there experiments you introduced that didn’t work out?

Krzysztof: What’s really great about Żabka is that they’re not afraid to experiment — to invest time, resources, money — in trying something. For example, when the pandemic hit, my manager built a full click-and-collect feature within the app in three months. The market landscape changed completely overnight, you couldn’t go into stores, and in under three months the entire click-and-collect system within the app was built, which was absolutely remarkable. And later, when it was no longer needed, it was removed.

There were experiments like a Żabka version of “Too Good to Go” — the ability to order items from stores whose expiry dates were approaching, at a reduced price, so you could get them cheaply while also reducing food waste. Żabka built their own portal for this — but at some point it was discontinued too.

What I really like about Żabka is that they’re not afraid to remove features from the app. I personally love giving users a full spectrum of convenience, so I built about four ways to add a payment card to the app: you could type the card details manually, take a photo so OCR could read the information, tap the card against NFC, or — the crowning feature — have the card added automatically when you paid with it at a Żabka terminal. You pick up your items, go to the checkout, scan the Żabka app, pay with your card, and shortly after the card appears as added. Of course we rolled that out — and then it turned out: first you need one customer consent, then another, then the card won’t appear automatically anyway because you still need to enter the CVC/CVV code, and so on. It became full of stumbling blocks. We launched it anyway. And of course the data showed that less than 1% of cards added to Żabka Pay were added that way. And this is where the company’s courage shows — that this feature was eventually removed. We decided it wasn’t working, even though we’d spent this much money and this much time on it. Too bad, but let’s remove the feature. Żabka doesn’t have a problem doing that.

Bartosz: That sounds really great — it shows the maturity of the organization, and above all the people making those decisions: why keep burning money on something the data clearly tells you isn’t working?

An element that I assume ran through both Żabka and Modivo is loyalty. From your perspective — are we as people still looking for that loyalty element, rewards for our purchases and our belonging to a customer group, or are we already oversaturated with it? How do you do it smartly today, in a non-intrusive way, that actually keeps the customer with you?

Krzysztof: It’s important to remember that a loyalty program is only one slice of the overall offer. Even if we had the best loyalty program in the world, if the whole business and offering is mediocre, customers still won’t come back. A lot of loyalty programs are still like those stereotypical ones at petrol stations, where you have to collect points for 200 years before you eventually get some kind of toy mascot at the end.

Żabka showed a really smart approach here. Setting aside the fact that the points are relatively easy to earn, various different mechanisms for earning them were introduced — not just for purchases, which is obvious, but for various types of actions. Personally, as the app owner, I really loved being able to use Żabsy as a tool for onboarding customers to new features. For example, we launch Żabka Post — the option to pick up parcels — and to onboard people to it, to show them it’s great and convenient, there’s always a barrier to getting people to try new features. So we could say: since you’re already using this for the first time, you get 20 Żabsy.

A lot of the mechanisms in Żabka were what we internally called “quests” — challenges you could set for customers. Buy Big Milk three times, get 100 points. Buy Big Milk three times, get the fourth one free. Not only did this add variety to how you could collect Żabsy — it was also a fantastic monetization format. You could sell the Big Milk manufacturer this format as a form of advertising. Why wouldn’t that company pay for the privilege of being a challenge rather than just a boring banner or a push notification in the app? So there’s definitely a great opportunity there — not just a boring “show your card, we’ll credit you points per złoty spent” — but wrapping it in many other mechanisms. Including, for example, partnerships with external companies, where you do something in another app and earn points with us.

The other really interesting side of this is Modivo. For a while, before a dedicated loyalty program person was hired, I helped piece together the Modivo loyalty program — which no longer exists in that form, as it’s now been replaced by the new Modivo Club. But Modivo Club is truly great — it covers CCC, eobuwie, Modivo, HalfPrice — practically all the brands under the CCC umbrella are included within that one program. And that’s a huge advantage — you have that one app or that one card, and whichever of those brands you go to, you still have one place to collect your points. That’s a completely different approach — using scale and a range of brands to attract people to the program.

Bartosz: True, and I also get the sense that people today don’t want to sign up for yet another loyalty program. But if they’re already part of one loyalty ecosystem and can use it across their other favorite stores — well, I assume CCC does this well, simply directing their customers from one of their entities to another.

Krzysiek, I’m wondering how you see the future of retail. Let’s not look too far ahead — let’s take a five-year horizon. What will change, and what will stay?

Krzysztof: For quite some time now we’ve been saying that retail will become more of a showroom than an actual point of sale. Because e-commerce is where the selling can happen, and retail will be the place where you can see and physically touch products, and potentially serve as a pickup point. And in many cases that probably will be the reality — stores will be somewhat smaller, more focused on the in-store experience rather than the spontaneous walk-in purchase.

A great example — I was in London just under two years ago on a “Retail Safari,” where we walked around various interesting stores that had great digital elements inside. They function normally — obviously it’s London so these are flagship stores operating normally and serving customers. An interesting observation was that most of those stores were monobrand — because it’s somewhat easier when you have your own products to wrap everything in a nice digital context.

But what I found really exciting was a mobile network called EE. A mobile network that had its flagship concept store, where on one hand the interior design was incredible — a sort of homey feel. There was a kitchen where you could chat with advisors and look at devices. There was a whole gaming corner where you could sit down at a computer and actually play games. And what was really cool was what they called a “digital spa.” It was a room roughly the size of the one we’re sitting in right now — full of screens and mirrors, very quiet calm music, a forest view on the screens. The idea was that there were mats so you could lie down and rest and switch off — switch off from both sound and from the intensity of the world. I’m not saying whether it makes sense or not, but it was certainly a very interesting approach. Someone invested money in it — it wasn’t cheap. And that’s one of the interesting cases that points me toward the idea that stores are moving increasingly toward experience rather than pure sales.

But also, somewhat in contrast — in my view, Digital will soon become the mass-market experience for customers, while the premium experience will be the experience with another human being. So for premium brands, you’ll still have someone serving you in the store, an actual person talking to you, smiling at you, folding your clothes, beautifully wrapping your purchase. The mass-market experience will increasingly feature self-checkouts, complete self-service, where you can return an item in a machine and pick up an item in a machine. In premium brands, digital will be a backdrop — displaying something, deepening the experience — but won’t be used for self-service. In widely accessible stores, automation will be pushed much more strongly.

Bartosz: That’s a nice vision, I think.

Krzysztof: It’s an interesting one. And you can already see it — you can see self-service solutions now even in fashion stores, because H&M in London had this type of automated return solution too. You see it in implementations like Żabka Nano, or there’s also a similar small chain in Poland called Pico24, based in Żory near Katowice, where they have these autonomous stores. For a convenience concept like Żabka, this kind of automation is ideal — because you don’t need human interaction at a checkout, the point is to get through a very small purchase as quickly as possible. But in some places, I genuinely think most people would rather buy a Porsche being welcomed with a glass of champagne than from a robot dispensing it from some giant vending machine.

Bartosz: I agree. How do you think retail businesses should prepare for this vision of yours?

Krzysztof: Beyond unifying data — well, there definitely needs to be strong preparation at the technological level. What I mean is that the solutions being implemented should avoid vendor lock-in and should be future-ready, something flexible — because the rapid changes we’re seeing now in the new tools emerging mean we need solutions that can be quickly pivoted in a different direction. It can’t be a monolith locked into one direction, like a supertanker that takes forever to change course — it needs to be solutions that allow you to quickly build something new from different building blocks and respond to unusual situations, or radical ones like COVID. Because you can see which companies won at that moment through their agility, or just through normal responsiveness to technological evolution — when suddenly AI appears, suddenly glasses with screens appear, and so on. You’ll need to react quickly to be first, to incorporate it, to use it in some meaningful way.

Bartosz: Right — agility is still very much with us and it’s only becoming more important. I didn’t have this question prepared, but you mentioned glasses — I assume you mean the ones Meta released with Ray-Ban recently. Is there a gadget on the market right now that you’re hunting for, waiting for? Our viewers and listeners don’t know this, but you’re also an avid gadget enthusiast. I remember seeing you had some kind of implant you could pay with?

Krzysztof: That’s right. I actually can’t use it anymore, because it has an expiry date like a payment card — so it’s simply expired now. Physically it’s still in here and it works, but you can’t pay with it anymore. But it’s a really fascinating solution — it’s NFC, so of course it has no power source of its own. It sends a short signal when you bring it close to a terminal — and the terminal gives it just enough power to respond with the payment token.

So yes, there are things like that. The same company has something else in the works — more of a curiosity at the moment, but they’re preparing a similar implant this time for tracking blood sugar levels. It’s more of a medtech thing, but also very interesting. And it’s a Polish company, so I’m watching it closely — it’ll be relatively easy to get hold of here.

I’m very much looking forward to those glasses — I still have the first version of the Ray-Bans, which had no screen, just cameras, and that was already a really fun experience. The version with the display opens up completely new possibilities. There are also plenty of valid critical voices — even today on the way here I was reading someone’s LinkedIn post saying that instead of spending 4–5 hours of screen time on your phone you’ll end up spending 16 hours, which is a legitimate concern. But that doesn’t change the fact that as soon as there’s an opportunity to buy them — unfortunately we’re a third-tier country for a company like Meta, so you have to go to Germany or Italy to get one — but I’ll definitely be making that trip to pick one up.

Bartosz: Krzysiek, at the end I have a question that’s characteristic of this podcast. Could you tell us what has inspired you recently? It could be an event, a product, a conversation, a film, a book.

Krzysztof: I’ll tell you what inspired me recently at my company at Tauron — and not from the technology side, but from the perspective of using data. I work at Tauron, it’s my second stint there, and energy isn’t my great passion business-wise or domain-wise — I prefer retail. That said, there are interesting things you can do in energy. And recently the company pleasantly surprised me. Because for me — and probably for most people — energy is relatively boring, as we said. You don’t get excited about whether you’re on tariff G11 or G12. But what the company showed recently is that you can actually do something genuinely exciting — because they used data to create a new tariff called G13S. They used consumption data from smart meters, data about actual customer consumption profiles — how customers really use electricity — and built a new tariff that responds to real needs and helps people save energy.

The tariff has its more expensive and less expensive hours, but those hours are aligned with the customer’s life cycle — so if a customer chooses this tariff, by sometimes shifting certain actions, like running the washing machine at a different time, they can genuinely save money. It may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it genuinely surprised me in a good way. It showed the real use of data to prepare a truly valuable product — valuable not just for the company, but genuinely valuable for customers, in what is a relatively unsexy domain like energy. That, I think, is something interesting.

It really surprised me and actually inspired me a bit. It’s a great use of smart devices — because I think many people look at smart devices and think: “Oh cool, I can connect it to my phone and see the consumption.” Full stop. But here you have a real-world example of using the data that those devices can collect. As I said, Tauron has extraordinary amounts of this kind of data — once we learn to use it properly, we’ll be able to help customers through the app to use less, use it more wisely, and so on. The potential is enormous. If we can get our hands on this properly, the potential really is enormous.

Bartosz: Fantastic. Thank you very much for today’s conversation.

Krzysztof: Thank you very much.

Bartosz: And thank you all for listening and watching — see you in the next episode of Euvic Talks.