Jardine Restaurant Group (JRG) is making use of open data to engage online audiences and a martech stack to convert them into sales for its quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains Pizza Hut, PHD and KFC.
The group has QSR operations in Hong Kong, Macao, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam, and has been undergoing a digital transformation since 2019.
Chief digital officer Matthew Chan told Google Cloud’s That Digital Show podcast that the group is heavily focused on customer-centricity and wanted to make its customer interactions more data-driven.
To do so, it is using Google Trends to source topics that it can start conversations with online, and then marketing technologies to convert that engagement into traffic to - and sales for - its QSR brands.
The technology underpins and implements a strategic framework that Chan calls TTT - talkability, traffic and transactions.
“This framework identifies talking points that will encourage curiosity and start meaningful conversations, driving traffic to the site and ending with successful transactions,” JRG said.
TTT is supported by a digital operations team that Chan said combines “CRM and e-commerce functionalities in order to have a better approach to serve our customers”.
They also proactively engage in the social media discussions that are used to funnel customers to the group’s QSR properties.
“We are trying to convert all this curiosity into [traffic to] our own websites,” Chan said.
“We use different types of marketing technologies to convert this traffic into transactions. I can’t share the exact number, but the conversion rate that we have is double-digit, much higher than the market norm.”
Chan said that JRG had done this successfully across brands over the past two years.
To become even more data-driven once a conversion has taken place, JRG has created a customer data platform (CDP) that runs on Google Cloud.
This helps the company to stay true to its customer-centric ethos, and to improve personalisation.
“The more intelligence you have within the dataset of your customer, the easier it is to deliver a better experience for the customer,” Chan said.
“This is what we truly believe and the area that we keep investing into.”
Chan said that JRG is also starting to explore how emerging technologies, such as the metaverse, might impact the QSR business.
“In the last 12 months, metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchains keep arising, which we need to pay attention to because if people are focusing their attention in this area, they expect something so we need to always keep a sense of happenings in the market,” Chan said.
“When we go to the metaverse for an immersive experience, will the experience change? I think they [will be able to] order in the metaverse in a virtual store. When they serve the food, how can it really be delivered to the customer in a proper way?
“This is something quite fun.”
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