Mobilizing and modernizing for growth.

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Qdoba

In the midst of a digital transformation, Qdoba needed guidance. With their brand’s integrity at stake, they needed a partner to help them through an extensive brand refresh that included their online presence, a mobile loyalty program, modernized technology and what their brand stood for. Qdoba also wanted results. They knew only an unparalleled mobile experience and revamped web experience could help them achieve the kind of growth they sought.

 

LOYALTY | EXPERIENCE IMPROVEMENT | PRODUCT ROADMAP

Founded originally as Zuma Fresh Mexican Grill, Qdoba operates approximately 700 restaurants in 47 states. Qdoba believes in flavor without compromise and promises an experience to its guests that delivers on new creations, old classics and a wide range of customization to meet every customer desire.

The Challenge

In the fast-paced world of fast-serve restaurants, brands must constantly innovate to stay top of mind with customers. Menu and food innovation aside, it’s also imperative that customers are able to access your brand when they want, where they want, both simply and easily. In the face of declining revenue, Qdoba needed a digital solution to ensure the success of their business. Qdoba was ripe for a rebrand and could earn back share and revenue via a rewarding loyalty program.
person holding phone with Qdoba application on screen.

Our Approach

Qdoba needed a complimenting web and app presence that could help build relationships with new customers while increasing loyalty among returning customers. One challenge they faced was the size and variance of their menu. New customers may not be able to easily navigate it and returning customers may head straight for their favorite items, bypassing new or promoted offers.

To fully engage anyone interested in Qdoba, our approach segmented customers by platform. We designed the responsive web experience for someone discovering the brand and menu, enticing them to choose Qdoba. The mobile app, a first for Qdoba, would cater to a highly-engaged audience who know the brand already.

For the web experience, Bottle Rocket provided a user-focused order flow, making a varied menu easy to explore for new customers while allowing return customers to intuitively find what they wanted.

Qdoba had already developed a loyalty program, but needed an easy way for users to engage with it while on-the-go. So, we natively developed a mobile app geared toward Qdoba’s most frequent and valuable customers. Along with loyalty, the app incorporated mobile ordering and payment and recognized mobile context to deliver hyper-personalized messaging. This helped communicate the program, as well as engage the most devoted Qdoba patrons with gamification principles.

Since some Qdoba locations are franchise owned, web and mobile integration with their backend posed a challenge. Not only could prices and products differ from store to store, so could point-of-sale or other technology. Since our core is frictionless user experience, we put forth uncompromising effort to solve problems that prevent it. So, we developed a unified experience to bridge all systems and variables for zero friction on any platform at any Qdoba location.

Middleware of this kind had to be scalable to meet customer demands for ordering, loyalty, mobile payment, and cloud service. Our developers created middleware that handled all that and allowed franchise owners to easily change menu options. Users could see the most up-to-date information about any Qdoba location with the same branded experience on web or mobile, even while using the loyalty program.

Bottle Rocket brought Qdoba to the mobile space with a seamless loyalty experience that catered to needs of on-the-go customers and added a sales channel for store owners. The fully redesigned web experience onboarded new customers with simple navigation through a complex menu that matched the ease of scrolling and tapping through their app. This was achieved with our custom-built middleware, which circumvented costly and time-consuming construction or redesign of business systems.

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