Background
The challenge
Prezzo has over 245 restaurants across the country, with 200 under the core Prezzo brand and 37 under its Mexican-themed Chimichanga. The Prezzo restaurant group also operates the Cafe Uno, and Cleaver chains in the UK.
Prezzo approached Planning-inc with a number of business and operational challenges to which they sought a data-led solution.
A key objective for the business was to address the overwhelming reliance on promotions to drive footfall into restaurants. Prezzo realised that only through harnessing the data assets at their disposal and by fully understanding customer-level dining trends could they address this issue. They saw an opportunity to move from ‘one size fits all’ discounting to a strategically driven one to one communication programme, where promotions were managed at a customer-level based on engagement and spend.
The business was also keenly aware that being able to address this fundamental challenge would open up the potential for a whole raft of business and customer insight to drive operational and guest experience management activity.
The implementation had a truly transformative impact on a business in a highly competitive sector. The infrastructure built with Planning-inc represents a powerful customer experience management platform that is moving the dial for the business in terms of incremental revenue and guest management.
The Apteco Solution
Given Prezzo’s requirements and the potential of their data, Planning-inc proposed a solution that would harness Apteco's key assets. With the solution providing a gateway between till data, customers and the delivery of targeted dining vouchers, Prezzo can fully harness the potential of their data.
Where once the business was constrained by disparate and inaccessible data sources, offering limited opportunity for customer insight, Apteco provides Prezzo marketers with access to a Single Customer View, incorporating transactional, customer behavioural and engagement activity, such as EPOS sales and discount data, voucher issuance and redemption providers, email response data, member feedback, payment app data, online reservations through third parties, customer service data and gift card sales.
Marketers are able to fully leverage a sophisticated customer matching process and leverage a vast array of data assets. As a result, Prezzo has been able to dramatically accelerate its understanding of guests and dining trends, developing an advanced and actionable picture of their customer. Prezzo could now move away from one-size fits all offers and create micro customer segmentations and a true customer lifecycle could be defined, with lapsing behaviour identified based on channel response metrics and dining habits.
With all POS and till data brought into the system, Prezzo users can easily run “basket” analysis to understand correlations between specific menu items, ordering sequences and customer or visit value. In addition, Prezzo is able to leverage data to directly inform approaches to key operational initiatives such as menu development and pricing, stock management and restaurant location planning.
Moving forward, a whole programme of behavioural-led communications are on the roadmap for delivery. The targeting opportunities are endless; crucially the business is now enabled to focus on managing key elements of customer experience.
The impact on the business
Explore some examples of how companies currently benefit from Apteco marketing software.
Seamless integrations with existing communication channels
With email representing a key communication channel for Prezzo customers, PeopleStage has been seamlessly integrated directly with the business’ email services provider, ExactTarget, to support email broadcasting.
Multi-channel campaigns to support business strategy
Apteco supports several approaches to targeting, offering Prezzo marketers full flexibility for achieving differing campaign selection requirements based on business needs.
Optimising customer experience by managing promotions in real-time
To optimise activity and increase sophistication of targeting, communications needed to be unique and personalised. Planning-inc worked with Prezzo’s to create a custom integration that enabled the real-time execution of voucher driven campaigns with personalised 1-2-1 offers.
No unnecessary processing of virtual variables
Planning-inc developed a customised persisted variables folder allowing Prezzo to specify which virtual variables created should be refreshed each time the system is deployed, without the need for changes. This is crucial as it enables fully automated campaigns without unnecessary processing of variables.
Evolving Prezzo’s customer contact strategy
With the infrastructure built, tested and imbedded, Prezzo looked to quickly drive value from the newly available data and campaign toolkits. Using a combination of visualisations including cubes, charts and venn diagrams to begin to understand the targeting scope and opportunities available, the teams were quickly able to build and launch prioritised marketing programmes.
Apteco marketing software users can make use of the multitude of campaign collateral held within the offer portal. All of this complex functionality is fully hidden from the marketing user, who simply needs to select the relevant channel and ensure that the offer ID is specified within the content step.