How Brooks Bell & a leading American fast-food brand partnered to connect the digital and physical worlds.
For many brands, the ability to deliver a seamless customer journey across devices is a critical competitive edge, but doing this right requires brands to be equally concerned with understanding what their customers buy, as well as when, how and why they make their purchases.
The restaurant industry is no exception to this rule. As the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, so did consumers’ reliance on mobile apps for various services, including food delivery and restaurant orders.
According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2023 State of the Industry Report, 78% of consumers have used a restaurant’s website or app to place an order. App Annie’s State of Mobile report reveals that consumers spent over 4.5 trillion hours on mobile in 2023, up 20% from 2022, showing sustained growth in mobile usage.
So, given these trends, it’s lucky that one American fast-food chain was already ahead of the curve. The brand turned to Brooks Bell’s consultants for help with optimizing their newly-launched mobile app and fully integrating it into their customer journey.
The Brooks Bell team laid the foundation for an insight-driven product innovation practice, which included defining success metrics, identifying key customer segments, creating processes and governance for data use, experimentation, and feature design, and helped design a roadmap for future omnichannel innovations.
Our Approach
Brooks Bell consultants thrive on tackling complex marketing and CX challenges that demand a multidisciplinary approach.
Our ideal client shares our vision of unlocking untapped potential within their organization and embraces customer-centricity while mitigating risk through a test-and-learn approach.
For these reasons and more, the mobile app team at our client’s organization was a perfect fit. Recognizing that the most successful apps prioritize engagement over revenue optimization, the team sought to use experimentation and UX research to make improvements to the mobile app experience, as part of an initiative to increase engagement and customer lifetime value.
But the team needed help. They knew they weren’t leveraging data effectively to make mission-critical decisions around marketing and feature design and needed help establishing baseline metrics, as well as identifying data gaps and optimization opportunities.
Our initial assessment uncovered that much of our clients’ existing and historical data was grossly inaccurate. Consequently, during the first few months of our partnership, we focused intensely on establishing an analytics strategy and infrastructure.
As we put tools, systems and processes in place to begin capturing correct data, we also audited six months of historical data. Additionally, we created dashboards and KPI reports, unified data and processes across multiple native app tools and platforms, and began tracking and analyzing customer behaviors. Concurrently, our UX practice began conducting usability studies and interviews at the restaurants to shape new ideas for product developments and experiences to build and test.
Brooks Bell brought a data-driven methodology to building new features…Our culture has changed from one based on opinions and ideas to pointing to data that says we definitely made the product better.
– Mobile Product Director, Leading Fast Food Brand
Outcomes & Impact
With the right team, technology, tools, data and processes in place, our client was finally on the right path to reach their omnichannel goals.
Using insights sourced from both quantitative and qualitative data, Brooks Bell consultants shaped the client’s segmentation and user engagement strategy, leading to a 52% increase in month-over-month mobile customer retention rate.
After their product innovation practice began to ramp up, Brooks Bell consultants worked closely with the brand’s technology partners and IT teams to connect both the user front-end and technical back-end technologies across the store, mobile and online ordering experiences.
All of these elements were critical, not only for supporting the team’s immediate goals, but also to set the stage for an insight-driven omnichannel strategy that created long-term value for the company and eventually enabled them to thrive through the pandemic.
52%
month-over-month increase in mobile retention.
