How an orchestrated, customer-centric strategy charted the course for a national QSR brand to grow digital sales from 22% to 50%+.
Client Profile
National QSR Brand
Prepared By
Amanda Schlumpf
Strategic Growth & Transformation Executive
Most consulting engagements end with a recommendation. This one ended with working prototypes mapped to every major initiative.
By building the prototype alongside the strategy, it didn’t just accelerate delivery. It pressure-tested the thinking in real time and identified the gaps before they became expensive. The result was a next-level, high-confidence strategic approach and roadmap.
Solution approach was designed to collapse the strategy-to-execution gap
Business + customer evaluation, market trends, segment validation, experience + need state assessment, data + tech audit.
Loyalty member user research + diary study, RFM analysis, future state ideation across program, ordering, and beyond.
Top-down/bottom-up goal setting, prioritization + impact analysis, future state technology architecture design.
Performance model development, activation recommendation, phased roadmap with measurement plan design.
Strategic recommendations delivered alongside high-fidelity interactive prototypes. Development teams visualized target state and began scoping concurrently, eliminating the months-long translation gap.
Strategy, design, media, and tech worked simultaneously. Friction points translated into modernized UX flows, validated against media strategy and tech feasibility in real time.
Every pillar validated by real data. The RFM insight — that mid-tier members, not top-tier, held the real incremental upside — became the lens for every decision.
The brand had a large national footprint and a meaningful loyalty base, but digital sales were stalled. Growth was constrained less by media spend and more by disconnected infrastructure, underdeveloped loyalty capabilities, and inconsistent store-level adoption.
Significant variance in store-level digital execution; a large subset of stores consistently underperformed the national average.
Store and regional activation strategy had to run alongside the national platform investment to ensure adoption.
Top-tier loyalty members were highly engaged, but the mid-tier member base represented an untapped volume of low-frequency digital users.
Mid-tier members became the highest-priority activation target — offering the highest incremental upside at lowest acquisition cost.
Non-loyalty digital sales experienced hyper-growth YoY, driven almost entirely by 3rd-party delivery — a good signal, but with unsustainable unit economics.
Own-channel ordering app + web had to become the primary revenue driver; 3rd party repositioned as an acquisition tool.
The legacy loyalty platform lacked headless architecture, flexible offer management, non-transactional points earn, and near real-time data sync.
A loyalty platform RFP was the single highest-priority technology decision — every Phase 2 and 3 capability depended on it.
The analysis reframed the growth strategy from “drive more digital orders” to a broader operating model shift: convert traditional customers into digital users, grow loyalty frequency, expand own-channel ordering, and modernize the platform foundation required to personalize at scale.
Drive-thru + in-store customers and non-digital loyalty members
Digital loyalty members + non-loyalty digital customers
Non-loyalty in-store customers; email/SMS opt-in growth
Non-loyalty online ordering; 3rd party customers; new markets
Customer-centric by design — not by default. Every pillar, KPI, and technology investment was anchored to three research-validated experience principles.
Research-validated principles that act as the foundation for every strategic pillar.
Effortless access to the right product based on purpose.
Helping guests discover how the brand supports their needs.
Rewards and motivation based on individual goals.
Sequencing was as strategic as the initiatives themselves — each phase gate had defined benchmarks before the next phase unlocked.
The engagement produced a funded, sequenced transformation roadmap with platform requirements defined, vendor selection underway, Phase 1 investment priorities approved, and a clear path from near-term conversion improvements to full loyalty and digital ecosystem modernization.