How Taco Bell kick started their CRM program with Xeno | Xeno's Resources (2024)

Taco Bell has become one of India’s most loved fast food chains in a short span of time. Burman Hospitality which runs Taco Bell in India has already set up over 50 outlets in India and plans to scale to over 600 Taco Bell outlets in the next 10 years. Taco Bell is known for serving a variety of Mexican snacks essentials and value menu items.

To scale so fast, Taco Bell knew that understanding their customers behaviour will be key to learn, iterate and improve. Taco Bell knew that in today’s competitive market, personalizing marketing communication is no more a “cherry on the top” but a necessity for brands to enable. Customers don’t want to be bombarded with communication irrelevant to them.

With that vision in mind to create personalised experiences for each customer, Taco Bell’s CRM journey in India started and we were lucky to partner with Taco Bell on this journey from day 1.

Watch Taco Bell’s Associate Vice President of Marketing Tushar Mehta talk with our co-founder Pranav Ahuja, sharing his journey of kickstarting Taco Bell’s CRM program & building a partnership with Xeno.

“If you need the right partner if you need a partner who understands your business if you need a partner who understands how the whole CRM thing comes about from how the integration happens, how the personas are built & how the customer bucketing happens. All that has to be done with the know-how of a partner who has done this consistently for brands and most importantly treats this entire journey as their own” says Tushar Mehta, AVP- Marketing at Taco Bell.

Step-1: Setting up an ecosystem for data collection

Despite all the talk about personalisation, 52% of marketers still struggle to consolidate their data (source: State of CRM Report).

Initially, Taco Bell heavily depended on customer data from the third party aggregators which only constituted 20% of the total customer data that should be available. But once Taco Bell understood that owning their customer data is the key to a strong CRM program, Taco Bell shifted from being a company that didn’t focus much on customer data collection to becoming a company that was keen to set up a robust data management system. This is when Xeno came into the picture and with Taco Bell’s strong focus the program kicked off.

Taco Bell increased its customer base multifolds in just 3 months

Taco Bell designed a custom data collection process along with Xeno that would allow them to capture data without reliance on the POS system. In just 3 months, Taco Bell went from 0% data capture for dine-in/ takeaway to 40% data capture at their outlets.

This progress was driven by 3 key factors:

1) Daily data collection reports which were sent to the management as well as the area managers that enabled the marketing & operations teams to keep the outlet staff on their toes.

2) Focus on training – Extensive training materials were created including videos and training sessions were provided to help ease out the ongoing process.

3) Constant checks – On-ground observation and anonymous store visits were also done to ensure the quality of data collected.

Step-2: Building 360° view & personas for each customer🌎

Once Taco Bell got the data infrastructure right. The focus shifted to understanding each & every individual customer.

Taco Bell created a 360-degree customer profile for each of its million-plus customers with the help of Xeno’s Next-Gen CRM. These 360* customer profiles enabled Taco Bell to understand each customer’s behaviour like their favourite food item, preferred marketing channel, discount seeking tendencies etc.

With those insights about each customer, Taco Bell was able to understand different kinds of customers.

For example:

Some Taco Bell customers love Nachos, majorly use Instagram, usually order late at night and their average transaction value is high, a persona is defined to that section with the following attributes.

Similarly customer personas are identified like, customers who love burritos, are mostly active on email, visit the store early in the day and their ATV is low or someone who loves burritos, prefers sms, visits the store in the day and their ATV is high.

These insights were understood not for a segment of customers, but for each & every individual customer.

Step-3: Taco Bell used a deep customer understanding to design a marketing strategy that’s relevant for each customer📣

“I haven’t ever seen before the integration and then the relevant insights in such a short time and that analysis even reflected in our campaign strategy. And what matters to us the most”, says Tushar on why you should consider working with Xeno.

Leveraging that deep customer understanding, Taco Bell was able to generate insights that led to the designing of a marketing strategy that was relevant for each customer. Beyond that, Taco Bell was also able to understand which products worked well with new customers and repeat customers. And also analyse which offers were able to get the most traction. Apart from this, they also tracked current customer retention, store level business numbers and movement in ATV of different customer segments. These business level insights enabled Taco Bell to take better decisions & craft a marketing strategy that catered both to creating customer relevancy while balancing the short term business goals.

Here are some of Taco Bell’s most recent campaigns:

“Best of Bell Menu” was one of their most successful campaigns. By analysing the data, Taco Bell was able to deliver a campaign that involved creating a “Best Of Bell Menu” consisting of best selling products of Taco Bell in the form of a platter. That too at cheaper prices. In a bid to attract customers and get them to try different varieties of products on offer.

Taco Bell, with the suggestions of Xeno’s Marketing Strategy team, ran 10s of such campaigns for their most promising customers. Different campaigns were run keeping in mind the personas.

Result: The campaign was a huge success. Initial analysis shows that selecting the most optimal audiences for this campaign using Xeno’s AI Audience Suggestions increased conversion rates by 2.5x.

Taco Bell & Xeno together achieved this success as partners

A partner knows and understands your pain-points and takes your problems as their own. The team at Xeno actively involves itself in understanding the customer and considers them as their own brand.

“They all consider Taco Bell as their own brand. Working with Xeno is comforting for the entire organization” – Tushar, Taco Bell

CRM marketing delivers ROI magnitudes higher than any other marketing campaign, but to achieve those results you want to put in the time & the effort to set up the right data infrastructure. Our biggest takeaway from Taco Bell’s CRM journey is that they focussed on doing CRM right from day one.