How One Restaurant Chain Satisfies Customer Cravings with Analytics | Publicis Sapient

Sapient Slingshot wins Technology Breakthrough of the Year.
Explore Slingshot
Sapient Bodhi ranked #1 for deep research.
Explore Bodhi
Meet Sapient Sustain: context-aware AI for complex IT operations.
Explore Sustain
3M lines of COBOL → clear specs in 8 weeks.
Get the details

How machine learning helped marketers test and scale winning offers.

An analytics platform turned customer data into more relevant marketing and more frequent visits.

hero-customer-story-restaurant-chain-analytics-personalization

A global restaurant chain wanted to scale the impact marketing has on business growth. The company had years of transaction data, but these records alone couldn’t tell marketers who was likely to visit, what might bring them back or which message would change their behavior. Turning that history into something marketers could act on was the real opportunity.

With Publicis Sapient’s help, the restaurant created a digital analytics platform to define customer segments and target communications. Machine learning helped the company better understand customer behavior, identity patterns and craft personalized campaigns, drawing a clearer link between customer data and the actions designed to increase visits.

This restaurant chain was conducting mass marketing campaigns based on stale customer data. The business was wasting marketing dollars and missing an opportunity to collect and act on up-to-date data to execute personalized campaigns. With the right analytics platform, they could continually test customer responses to offers and adjust marketing strategies accordingly.

Publicis Sapient leveraged machine learning and analytics capabilities made available through major cloud providers to develop with our client an analytics platform that generates insights and automates the creation of campaign audiences with a visualization tool. The platform uses customer transaction, registration, loyalty, and offer data to enrich customer profiles with current knowledge about their behavior and preferences. Marketing can then apply these insights for precise customer targeting in multi-channel campaigns that result in increased guest count, visit frequency, and basket size. Using artificial intelligence, the platform automates the test and learn process, so the marketing team can more quickly make changes that lead to desired outcomes.

The new cloud-based platform enables new ways of working for marketers. Machine learning and automation is making one-to-one personalization, and a rigorous method for applying it, a reality. Using analytics, a marketing team can conduct a series of experiments to validate hypotheses regarding what will motivate customers to shop more often and spend more. These experiments are conducted on small test groups and, once they succeed, they are scaled to national audiences to bring full benefits. Analytics, machine learning, and automation accelerates the identification of test hypotheses, the configuration of experiments, and measurement of test results to then in turn grow the digital business faster.

Jackie Walker
Retail Experience Strategy Lead, North America

Relevant Links

• Satisfying Customer Cravings with Analytics
• Regional Personalization Strategies for Global QSRs
• Test-and-Learn Automation: How QSR Marketing Teams Turn Customer Data Into Faster Decisions
• Omnichannel engagement in quick service restaurants
• The Role of Customer Data Platforms in Restaurant Personalization and Loyalty
• La personnalisation à l’échelle dans la restauration rapide : un levier de croissance concret pour les enseignes européennes (Europe)
• Personalización a escala en QSR: cómo convertir datos, lealtad y experimentación en crecimiento rentable en América Latina (LATAM)
• FAQ (FAQ)
• 10 Things Buyers Should Know About Publicis Sapient’s Restaurant and QSR Personalization Work (LIST)