UserTesting success story: How a fast food chain serves up delicious experiences

The Experience Optimization Team at one of the nation’s top fast-food chains runs all A/B tests on digital platforms, personalization across all digital platforms, most of the company’s user research and almost 100% of the digital user research. They started using UserTesting to get qualitative feedback on their mobile app. The company had been using another tool to outsource testing, but they weren’t getting the qualitative insights they wanted for specific UX features, so they switched to UserTesting to test web, kiosk application, offline components, digital mini-boards, and other services that were too difficult or too expensive for their team to test. Here’s what the team uncovered after gathering human insights via the UserTesting platform:

Product naming

Traditionally, the consumer insights team would conduct studies through a third-party agency that would have to recruit test participants. They might pay $30-40K for this and execution, and analysis would take six to eight weeks. The team realized that these simple tests could be done through UserTesting. They could access their exact audience and have results in a few hours versus a few months.

For example, there was a new campaign in Argentina and people needed information on it quickly. They found out the wording in Spanish was incorrect. It didn’t mean what they thought it did, and needed to figure out how to quickly get a suitable alternative. - Experience Optimization Manager

Loyalty program

The largest project the company did was a large-scale survey for their new loyalty program. The program was in development for almost two years and had launched earlier that year. Since the company uses a franchise model—it doesn’t own each store—the voices of their franchisees are important. Essentially, they’re the company’s customers. The loyalty program was designed to help franchisees make more money. All major restaurants have one. But many of the franchisees weren’t sold. They had a few lingering concerns:

• Was the program lacking? The first was that the offering wasn’t going to be as good as other quick service restaurants. The fear was that people were going to compare and contrast and find their program lacking.
• Could negativity go viral? The second was that people were going to be upset about the changes and complain on social media.

The company decided to use UserTesting to see if these concerns were valid. They used two groups: testers from UserTesting’s panel to test the experience with new people signing up for the loyalty program, and their own customers through UserTesting’s My Recruit to test the experience with existing loyalty program members. The team uncovered two different sets of actionable insights:

1. What they could take back to franchisees to assuage their concerns
2. Ways they could actually change the program

Worry about social media negativity invalidated

There were people that didn’t like this program switch, especially older members. But the people who disliked the program the most were also those that spent the least amount of time on social media. Those who liked the program spent the most amount of time on social media. So wide-spread negativity on social media was unlikely to be an issue.

Worry about program lacking invalidated

Testers were asked if they were part of another loyalty program and to share their thoughts on the company’s program vs. the other loyalty programs they were familiar with. 50% of those that took part in other programs thought that the company’s was better, and the rest thought it was the same. Only a small percentage rated it as worse.

Additional takeaways

Messaging

There was a strong correlation between how clearly people understood the email, and how much they liked the loyalty program. The takeaway for the team was that the success of the loyalty program was going to depend as much if not more on how it is communicated as on the details of the program itself.

Reward ranking

The company asked people to rank their favorite part of its reward program. The team was surprised to discover that the reward that interested customers most was one the team had dedicated very little time to in email communications. As a result of these insights, the team was able to include more focus on this type of reward in future emails to customers.

Fast human insights are on the menu

Whether a company’s goal is delivering great food, fast, or selling widgets, or a world-class enterprise SaaS, understanding customers through human insights is the key to creating a great experience, no matter where or how they happen. By adding qualitative insights to their existing quantitative testing, this company was able to fully understand how their customers interacted with the brand and what products and services they really wanted and were able to refine their UX enhancements and changes to reflect customer’s changing tastes.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to learn more about how UserTesting can help you understand your customers—and improve your NPS—through on-demand human insights, contact us here.