Taziki's Mediterranean Café

Barely a year ago I had no idea what CDPs or data warehouses were. Now, we’re on the cusp of them becoming integral business tools and the foundation of our MarTech stack. So what changed and why is this now what our fast casual restaurant chain is going to leverage all the way to a 5 percent lift in transactions in 2023?

Prior to 2020, almost all of our customers were dine-in and system-wide we ran 10-15 percent of revenue from catering. We knew who our customers were because we saw them, sometimes daily. Then the pandemic changed everything.

Our app (which we had but had been adopted sparingly) and third-party delivery platforms jumped into prominence out of necessity and our data became siloed— in-store POS, third party platforms, our app / online ordering system and catering. There was no comprehensive system that could market to all of our customer groups, or even just a few at the same time.

At the same time the Marketing Department was having this journey of frustration, our data analytics team was also getting to a breaking point because none of the reporting we needed to run our business was normalized and streamlined. That led us all down the path to a CDP and data warehouse.

Simultaneously, we had outgrown our POS which housed our loyalty, email marketing and gift card programs and were actively hunting for a replacement. Knowing a new POS would most likely not contain all of those marketing functions, I started the process of investigating replacements.

The key factor when talking to loyalty and messaging vendors was the ability to integrate with our data. Who was going to be able to get data out of our POS (whichever one we chose), our app / olo system (which was not going to change) and our advanced ordering (catering) system? Initially, we thought Salesforce was going to be that solution, but the integration was too steep of a climb. To build the system we needed, it would have been hours and hours and thousands and thousands of dollars of development work to get it stood up.

While I was moving in one direction with sourcing new vendors, our tech team was also sourcing CDPs so a marketing platform would ultimately only have to integrate with one system instead of 3-4. After many demos and hours of calls and meetings, mParticle was chosen as our CDP.

“The key factor when talking to loyalty and messaging vendors was the ability to integrate with our data.”

And ironically, we decided to stick with the current POS because they had acquired another company with technology to support enterprise systems like ours. With only a flip of a switch at headquarters we were going to be able to transform our POS functions from the backend without disrupting reporting and provide an identical experience for our restaurant crews. Additionally, some of the loyalty features had been upgraded so an immediate need to switch had disappeared.

Messaging was still an issue, though, so the hunt for a perfect solution was ongoing. The team at mParticle recommended we speak to Braze because they already had an integration in place between the two systems. We went through multiple demonstrations, I met with numerous other clients of Braze and had many discussions among ourselves in determining if Braze was the correct solution for us. Ultimately, we selected it as our messaging partner and a major reason was the integration.

With our new tech stack of mParticle as our CDP, Snowflake as our data warehouse and Braze as our messaging pattern, we are set to grow sales in 2023 because of the personalized marketing we will implement. We intend to slice and dice our customers into buckets by time of purchase, order mode, item purchased, visit frequency, etc. The possibilities are almost endless. When we started the onboarding process with mParticle they asked us what information from each order we wanted to record. My answer was, everything! Every single component of that ticket is another aspect of our customers that we need to know.

As I write this, we are only days away from mParticle getting completely stood up and the Braze onboarding has commenced. My excitement about the future possibilities can hardly be contained! We’ve never been able to reach customers in any customized way other than location, which was itself suspect because a purchase made at any location put the customer into that store’s bucket, leading to confusion when a customer in South Carolina received an email about a special in Nashville because they had visited that location once on vacation two years ago.

This journey may sound similar to one your team experienced or maybe you’re in the midst of it now. I often felt like I was a novice and the most non-technical person on our team, but I learned so much this past year. While I still don’t know the why or how of the technical aspects, I know what I want the end result to be and am excited to get going with these new systems!