Customer Journey Research & Mapping for a National Restaurant Chain

The Challenge

An international Restaurant Chain was looking to extend their leadership role with their customers and develop a deeper understanding of customer journeys in order to learn: 

• What are the key “moments that matter” to customers?
• Where do they occur across, and which moments matter the most?
• Where are the friction points in the journey, and how can they be resolved, addresses or minimized?
• Who in the industry is doing this well that this client could learn from?
• Understand motivation/barriers to using digital in relevant parts of the journey
• What is the business impact of delivering a friction-free, digitally-enabled journey?
• What untapped “10X” opportunities exist for small incremental changes that can significantly impact the business, and how can they be leveraged by this client?

The Solution

We proposed a robust research effort that included intensive workshops with the client’s cross functional teams to carefully evaluate three critical factors: Shopper segments, Channels (In-Restaurant, Delivery, Pickup) and Ordering Methods (In-Person, Over the Phone, Mobile and Drive-Thru). 

Key Path to Purchase shopper journey steps that were to be studied included:

• Trigger – what is the catalyst that begins a journey to the client’s restaurants
• Pre-order awareness and brand consideration
• Channel and ordering selection
• In-cafe experience
• Travel to / from café
• In-home experience, including referral and issue resolution

Based on these segments, channels and ordering methods, four research approaches were proposed:

• In-cafe qualitative shop-along research – with shopper segments in café dining and takeout
• “In-the-moment” mobile ethnographic qualitative research – with shopper segments for delivery and pickup
• Post-purchase quantitative online survey for reflective assessments of customer experiences
• “Real-time” customer behavioral research leveraging video graphic observation, eye-tracking and biometrics to understand customer behavior

Finally, post completion of the research, four key deliverables were provided:

• Restaurant experience/journey research report & findings
• Delivery & Pickup experience/journey research report & findings
• Path-to-Purchase journey maps for each category + differentiated segment/channel as noted
• Overall research report and customer journey improvement recommendations

 This project was executed over a 15-week period.

The Results

This research yielded three key components critical to a game-changing strategy for this national restaurant chain:

1. End-to-end journey insights that enabled this client to understand the pain points, triggers, moments-of-truth and decision points that customers encounter throughout their buying journeys.

2. In-restaurant and out-of-restaurant qualitative and quantitative analytics that provided both the insights and necessary quantification on key journey elements for diner segments in each channel as well as illuminated “latent” behavior-based segmentation possibilities necessary for a game-changing delivery approach.

3. Multiple customized journey maps, by segment and channel, with each containing:

• Voice-of-the-Customer verbatims that represented the sentiment of that segment of shoppers
• Purchase and Brand selection triggers that initiate customer path-to-purchase
• Pain points in the current journey that need addressing
• Key leverage points / “Moments of Truth” / inflection points that drive customer purchase decisions, loyalty and advocacy
• Key factoids that provide specific data critical to decision-making and differentiation across segments and channels
• Key insights, imagery and analysis from behavioral research