Taco Bell Boosts Conversions By Partnering with the Amplitude Professional Services Team

Insight/Action/Outcome: Taco Bell had a myriad of data from multiple in-store and digital touchpoints. They turned to Amplitude Analytics and the Amplitude Professional Services team to help the team define user and event properties, leverage advanced platform features, and maximize the value of their data. These efforts have increased conversion rates and traffic, and the team is delivering better products, services, and promotions to Taco Bell customers.

From chalupas to gorditas, Taco Bell is renowned for our innovative menu and decades of staying power in the global fast food scene. Yet, behind the scenes, we faced a significant hurdle: efficiently consolidating and analyzing data from an increasingly complex array of digital touchpoints.

Taco Bell launched in 1962 in Downey, California, as a single location with a walk-up window. Now a household name, we have grown to 8,212 international locations, serving food to over two billion customers yearly. Through it all, we reinvent ourselves and innovate to keep up with changing consumer tastes and technological advances.

Some of these advances include mobile apps, online ordering systems, and in-store kiosks, all of which give us data that we use to understand our customers and make their experience better. However, we needed help controlling the sheer volume and diversity of this data. Without the right tools and assistance to generate meaningful insights, it was increasingly difficult to maintain our competitive edge.

Finding the right mix of analytics and support

Even though Taco Bell has a worldwide presence with millions of loyal customers, we can’t afford to be complacent. Our competitors use data to stay ahead of changing customer expectations and food industry trends, and so must we. I used to lead the Data and Analytics team in consolidating and analyzing data from our diverse customer touchpoints, and I had to source a powerful solution to help me do it.

Our requirements were straightforward. We needed:

• a quicker path from insight to action
• a process for correlating in-app conversions and customer engagement
• intuitive analytics and visualization tools to bridge the gaps between data, insights, and action
• strong support to back us up

The fast food business moves fast, and we needed the ability to problem-solve, onboard, and upskill people quickly as we grew our analytics capabilities.

We talked to many vendors, but only Amplitude offered the combination of a robust analytics platform power with a superior customer success offering.

The Amplitude Premium Success Package (PSP) combines the industry-leading Amplitude Analytics platform with white-glove support from the Ampitude Professional Services team, who are experts in onboarding, implementation, technical assistance, training, and strategic guidance. PSP was the perfect solution to transform our data landscape as we optimized customer experiences to maintain our leadership position in the competitive fast food space.

PSP delivers rapid time to value

We started seeing value from Amplitude PSP right away. The onboarding process was streamlined and methodical. Amplitude Customer Success Architect Ted Clark unearthed the platform’s potential, guiding us toward features and functionalities we might not have considered otherwise. Ted was genuinely excited about our work, and we fed off of each other’s energy. He helped us define our Amplitude implementation during onboarding and was always available as a thought partner as we progressed on our analytics journey.

His knowledge was especially useful when brainstorming different ways to examine our data and helping us define user and event properties to maximize the value of information flowing from our digital touchpoints. We turned to Ted and his considerable expertise when we encountered an issue or stumbled in our Amplitude implementation. If he didn’t have the answer, he would connect us to Amplitude developers and other experts to resolve our issues, implement another feature, or develop a new workflow.

The additional levels of expertise meant we could move quickly and make big strides rather than spend a lot of time struggling on our own.

In addition to Ted’s ongoing assistance, Taco Bell’s analytics team had the backing of Amplitude’s 24/7 support specialists, who provided a two-hour response time and proactive technical help. With mountains of data to sort, our analysts don’t have time to double as developers and engineers, and support from the professional services team lets them focus on finding insights to improve our product offerings and boost our bottom line.

Detailed instruction empowered our teams

Amplitude’s strength is easy-to-understand dashboards and visual analytics. Its intuitive interface simplifies information so everyone can make sense of it and take action based on that data. However, the platform has dozens of powerful features and functionalities beyond dashboards. Without expert guidance, even veteran analysts can fall into a trap, limiting themselves to the most obvious event or user properties and using only the most basic segmentation charts.

Amplitude’s professional services team provided the guidance necessary to elevate our instance and allowed us to explore our data more deeply. The package included in-depth user workshops with customized instructor-led sessions, which gave my team hands-on training on advanced Amplitude features. We also used Amplitude Academy so that team members could learn more about the platform online on their own time. They even earned Foundations and Practitioners badges and took optional proctored exams leading to Amplitude Data Management Expert Certification.

Growing our in-house expertise and leveraging the proactive support we get through PSP helped us extend our core competencies, refine user cohorts, and build more complex dashboards. Diving beneath the surface, we learned how to use Amplitude to its full potential, allowing us to wrangle our data and use it to meet our business objectives.

Data governance and strategic guidance lead to reliable insights

Even the most skilled team using the most robust platform won’t be effective if the data going into the platform isn’t clean. The additional consultation from the professional services team helped enhance our data governance by auditing our data and methodically classifying our events, making our insights more reliable. We learned to measure what matters, align event data with our analytics goals, track events that predict retention, and build a comprehensible taxonomy for my team.

Ted held our hand as we left our comfort zone and began aggregating and visualizing data strategically. The Taco Bell app has hundreds of product pages and an untold number of user paths. He helped us refine our views of customer journeys, build focused cohorts, and run better experiments to understand customer behavior and create compelling experiences for them.

Ted provided the strategic guidance we needed to pinpoint high-impact areas instead of guessing where to focus our efforts. He helped us identify growth opportunities and make data-driven decisions by using Amplitude to widen the scope of our questions and the breadth of our analytics activities to delight our customers and increase business efficiency.

Driving growth and better customer service

We’ve made a lot of progress and can dig down and impact certain KPIs, such as retention, conversions, traffic, and revenue. We were also seeing positive growth for conversion rates and traffic, noting that conversion rates didn’t drop as traffic increased.

We can see our work paying off, illustrating just how transformative the investment in PSP has been for Taco Bell. We gained comprehensive support, expertise, and strategic guidance to advance Taco Bell’s journey toward data-driven success. We can segment, analyze, and action information from all of our digital channels to deliver better products, services, and promotions for our customers.

With Amplitude's expert guidance and tailored support, we've overcome our data challenges and harnessed the full potential of our data, driving significant business growth and better decision-making across the organization.