Recipes for Mobile App Personalization Success

Hi, everybody, very excited to be talking to you today. So, I know mobile has essentially become one of the most important channels to drive, you know, customer orders, and more. So with pandemic, this has essentially become an extension of your store. And a little while back, you know, the poll that we ran, we saw, you know, a lot of you unanimously voting that a mobile app is going to be the channel, which is going to be driving a customer orders in the future. While we all agree that having a mobile app won’t be just enough, we will need, you know, ways to personalize the customer experience, keep it interesting, keep it engaging, we want customers to keep coming back on it. And that’s essentially the, you know, agenda for my session today. And what I’m going to be doing today in this session is talk to you about some interesting examples and use cases where, you know, we can personalize QSR apps. What I’ve also done is I’ve picked up very interesting examples of some of the QSR apps, who’ve done a tremendous job at personalizing customer experience sort of curated some of those examples that I’ll be sharing today. And in the next half of the session, we also have, you know, certain, you know, showing us demonstrating how we can use the economy personalization platform to essentially, you know, personalized some of these use cases. So that’s gonna be the agenda for the session today. Before I will get further into the slides, here’s a quick snapshot of the brands with our brands that we work with, with, you know, some of the fast casual and fine dining plans that we work and the franchisees that we work with. For brands, we essentially use a solution to centralize the entire insights and to help them run centralized campaign execution. And for franchisees, we essentially help them in getting a centralized view of insights across all the brands. Now, these brands could be multi country, you know, could have a very different set of menus could be operating in multiple currencies. And, you know, these are some of the challenges that our solution perfectly scales to and help them manage. Here’s a set of solutions that we take to market for the restaurant vertical, we broadly classify these solutions, as providing customer excellence, and operational excellence. And within customer excellence, the solutions that we take to market our customer data platform, which essentially helps unify all the customer data together and provide a single view, this essentially enables marketers to get a better understanding of the customer. And we just saw in the poll that, you know, we ran a lot of customers, a lot of you actually selecting that as one of the challenge areas for you. And so that’s definitely is a interesting way for us as well, then the customer analytics solution really further taps into this unified view of data, where it taps into it to really identify if there are any customer opportunities, you know, through auto discovery of new segments. And then, and we all know, you know, customer journeys have become very complex, they’re not linear anymore, customers usually go through a, you know, a complex cycle of research and purchase across multiple channels before they really make a purchase. So we have a customer journey orchestration tool, which essentially helps you engage these customers as they move from one channel to another through this complex cycle of purchase, repurchase and research. So that’s the journey orchestration do. We also have a real time omni channel personalization capability, which can drive and deliver very tailored experience to customers, as they navigate through the mobile app, or web, or they go through searching some of the items they want to buy today, or, you know, even delivering cross sell and upsell options, and all delivered in real time based on the past purchase behaviors, or based on the current context and purchase intents. So, it’s a real time capability, which essentially delivers a very tailored experience. And then there is an operational excellence capability where we have a restaurant analytic solution, which essentially delivers business insights across sales, operations, promotions, customer satisfaction scores, and, you know, employee training. And the goal is to essentially help them you know, get real time view into their Operational Insights and also help them improve operational efficiencies. So this was just a quick snapshot.

I’ll just touch upon a very interesting research by Forrester, where they essentially said that, hey, if a customer is reaching out to a mobile app, there are only one of five reasons why would they do so. And, you know, and then they these reasons could be either they’re looking for something, or either they want to go somewhere, or either want to buy something, or either want to do something, or they really want to share something with their friends and followers. So these are essentially called as mobile moments where customers essentially reach out to mobile phone for help. And if brands really want to be relevant, they need to find a way to inject themselves in these mobile women’s. And while they do so they need to essentially deliver value to consumers while they are on the mobile app, you know, going through these mobile movements. So what we have done is we’ve taken that concept, and put it over on the food business, and really tried seeing what could be a mobile moment for, you know, QSR brands, when somebody is looking for food options. It could be Hey, you know, people are looking for food options, is there a way to nudge them to download your mobile app? If they are making an order? Is there a way we could essentially create and deliver a very personalized experience which enables them faster ordering? Is there a way we could give them options? Very smart, intelligent options are across Ireland themselves? And how do we keep brands on top of mind when somebody is coming back to make a reorder? Right, so we’ve taken that concept, put it into food business, and tried exploring that. And I’m going to be taking a few examples now, which essentially are across these customer lifecycle events, and see how we can actually personalize these mobile phones. To start with one of the most important, you know, for any QSR brand would be to essentially enable customers to download the mobile app. And we all know, customers who download the mobile app are highly likely to be ordered from you more often. So it’s absolutely important that you nudge customers to download the mobile app. But there has to be something which is rewarding, there has to be some reason or an incentive, why a consumer or customer should be downloading a mobile app. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken two examples, which I found to be very interesting. You know, the first one is McDonald’s, where they do a fantastic job at nudging customers to download the mobile app, they use an incentive strategy where there is incentive to download the mobile app, they get a free sandwich, if they download the mobile app and make an order. So that’s an interesting example. Another example is Pizza Hut on the right hand side where they using, you know, the experience, the faster order and a smoother experience on mobile app to really drive downloads of mobile app. So that’s another interesting example. And this is from an email that I received from them. So essentially, the idea is that all the channels, you know, where customer touches them, they really are trying to give them a message that a, you should be downloading a mobile app. So these are some of the very interesting examples of how some of these brands have deployed that strategy. Another challenge that comes after downloading mobile app is how do you get your customers to make the first purchase with you.

And obviously, deals is a very great way to get them started. Again, here’s an example from McDonald’s, who always have a lot of attractive deals to get customers started. Another interesting way to get customers started could be by being relevant. So I’ve used Starbucks as an example, which does a very good job at being localized, right. So, always has some localized messages for you, which is a very interesting thing. And we can, in fact, take that entire localization concept much further where we can, you know, start showing localized menus by daypack. So, for example, are showing breakfast menu items in the morning or showing lunch items in the noon and so forth, or even showing some popular items in your local area, or even showing local recipes that go well with the local weather in your area. So that whole localization can be take to all new level and can be delivered essentially give a very relevant experience. Another good way could be where you essentially learn from each and every interaction that the customer makes on the mobile app, you know, you know and then use those interactions to you know, in dynamically in real time change the entire experience. So if a customer is looking for a single server offering, or is the customer looking for a family offering, you will All those intent signals that you will see, dynamically personalize the entire content to deliver a relevant experience, that’s, that’s always a very interesting way to create relevance, and also to drive customers to make the first purchase with you. So these are some interesting examples. Now, very often, we get this challenge thrown at us by QSR brands, where they essentially want to build a customer experience, they want us to help them build these customer experiences, where customers can come in and make a order in 20 seconds or less. So that’s the challenge that we get thrown in. And, in fact, we’ve seen, the spirit of order is directly proportional to the experience customer gets on the app, the faster the customer can make an order, the higher the experience. In fact, it’s almost opposite to a fashion app where dwell time, you know, seems to be the metric to measure the engagement on the app. And it’s absolutely opposite on a QSR. And so, so having favorites bookmarked on the mobile app is a good start. But as a best practice, we what we recommend is, you know, making these, you know, item listings and menu listings on your mobile app dynamic. And so essentially, what the system should do is it should automatically sought the menu items in order of relevance. So for example, you know, if, you know, the system understands that you have higher preference for certain ingredients, you have a higher preference for certain menu items for combo packs for serving size, use all that information to dynamically sought these menu items. And this experience can be totally tailored for each individual customer, you know, thereby delivering one extremely phenomenal experience, which is absolutely unique, and also essentially enables faster ordering on the mobile app. So that’s one of the best practices that we, you know, always recommend our customers. And we found that to be really, really helpful in driving faster orders on the webinar.

Another, you know, great opportunity where you could personalize the experiences, when, you know, delivering recommendations on crosses and absence, again, a great opportunity to personalize. What we follow as a best practice, again, is, and I would also recommend everybody is to utilize the underlying purchase data, and mined that data to really find out what item affinities exist, what are the popular pairings that are happening. And in my own experience, I’ve essentially been surprised at times where, you know, the kinds of combinations that I’ve seen, you know, were not so intuitive at the first glance, but made all the sense. But that couldn’t have been done without mining the entire purchase data, right. So that’s an important part where we should just leverage all the purchase data to mine, those affinities out another extension of this use cases where you could also look at affinities between deals and menu items, right? So what does a phone 99 deal buy? What does a 1499 deal, right? And that’s, again, very helpful insight, which can help you one, personalize these deals correctly for customers. And also, it helps you in menu engineering and product mix analysis. So, you know, that’s a absolute recommended best practice to essentially mine the entire purchase data to really identify all these affinities that essentially can be gleaned from your datasets. Another interesting area, where I’ve seen a lot of advancements happening is where brands are trying to bridge the gap between physical and digital customer experience. And it all started with Starbucks, you know, a few years back that tremendous job with the brought in concepts like I had, and you know, scan in store where they almost bridge these physical and digital worlds together. And I’m seeing a lot of more brands adopting that whole thing. Here’s an example from Chick fil A, which does a extremely a tremendous job at bridging the physical and digital experiences together. And by doing that, you know, the tremendous opportunities that open up, there’s an opportunity to extend your in store purchase experience all the way to the right, or vice versa, you know, extend your app experience into the store. So you know, there is an opportunity to bring a complete consistency of experience, and no matter which channel do you choose from? And also by doing so, what happens underlying is that you have access to much more data. You really know what a customer does when they go in store. Right? Are they are they always going to install for family, dining and While they probably are ordering just for themselves when they use a mobile app, right, so all these insights can really be tapped, if you are integrating all these datasets together, and this will further help you personalize the entire experience for customers. So that’s an extremely important example, another example, which I’ve seen as where brands, you know, always show the past purchases another, you know, quick way to get customers to make faster orders. And this essentially, becomes extremely key and QSR concepts where you have to put a lot of ingredients together, right, so So for example, with a Chipotle, where you essentially have to put, you know, select from the type of rice, you have to select from type of being the type of protein, the type of vegetables that go with. So that bit of selection that you have to go through, and Chipotle does a good job of showing all your past purchases, you know, giving you a quick view into it, and allowing you to select from your past purchases, so that you don’t have to go through selecting all these ingredients each time you make an order, again, a very interesting way to you know, personalize the experience, and also to drive faster orders using a mobile app.

Let’s just take last example here. And that’s an interesting example. Now, it’s not important that you have a loyalty programme, but if you have a loyalty programme, there’s, I would always recommend to gamify that a bit. And here’s an example from Pizza Hut, who does a good job of gamification, where there’s, there’s a reward and incentive, you know, the customer, you know, completes a particular task, right. So, so that’s an interesting way to keep customers interested. And if you were to extend that concept, and, you know, combine this with a customer journey orchestration tool, you know, very interesting opportunities open up where you could, you know, send reminders to customers who are falling behind, you could build an urgency, or where you could essentially drive and nudge customers towards that goal. And that I’ve seen personally, to be very successful, not just in QSR industry, but I’ve seen these being very successful in supermarket chains as well. And also, it’s a very interesting way to retain your customers and having them frequently shop with you, and even, you know, to win back some of your last customer segments. So that’s a very interesting way. If you have a loyalty programme, you know, try and bring gamification Brian club with a marketing automation tool, to essentially build that urgency within your customers.