Overview

Our restaurant client was concerned about declining value-for-money scores and wanted to understand what was driving the change.

Initial analysis identified interesting anomalies in the company’s data. The most frequent customers gave lower scores. 

This shifted the research focus towards understanding how behaviour and experiences differed between frequent and infrequent customers.

Approach

Using ReTrack™, we relived customers’ experiences with them, exploring the journey from what prompted an order through to choosing, ordering and eating, to identify differences between frequent and infrequent customers.

By avoiding prior discussion of value for money or the client’s suspected causes, we could explore what emerged from those the experiences themselves, without directing attention towards particular factors or relying on customers to explain why they behaved as they did.

We also compared customers who had ordered earlier in the week with those who hadn’t, exploring where there might be opportunities to extend ordering beyond the weekend.

Output

We ruled out several factors that our client had suspected were significant. 

We discovered that infrequent users experienced negative feelings about over-ordering, which was driven by the pricing architecture.

Crucially, the same deals were experienced differently by frequent customers. Understanding what was driving this difference helped explain how an offer could support frequent ordering amongst some customers whilst creating barriers for others.

These insights gave the client direction on where changes to pricing, promotions and the ordering experience could help encourage more frequent purchase. We also identified opportunities to build on the service’s existing strengths and support ordering across a wider range of occasions.

The findings provided focused areas for experimentation, giving the team a basis for developing and testing changes.