I recently had the pleasure of working as the Sitecore Architect with Dine Brands, which operates the IHOP and Applebee’s brands, and a wonderful team of talented people at XCentium. This was an exciting project, which involved a complete transformation of both websites. Primarily, the intention, besides a beautiful redesign, was to integrate online ordering seamlessly into the visitor experience.
This required heavy collaboration and integration with their menu teams, their online ordering provider, and eventually an architecture within Sitecore to support it all. I had the privilege to speak about this integration on a panel at Sitecore Symposium, along with Sitecore MVPs, Jason Wilkerson and Tim Ahlenius. In this panel, I spoke about the elaborate ways we consumed data from multiple sources of information, and utilized that to deliver an enhanced online ordering experience.
I am pleased and honored to announce that Sitecore awarded the Sitecore Ultimate Experince Award to this project at Symposium 2018. In addition, Sitecore also awarded the Best Business ROI Experience Award to this project. As the architect for the project, this is the ultimate honor from Sitecore, but it was definitely a team effort, both from the Dine Brands team, which included Sitecore MVP Tim Braga, the leadership of Charlie Jones, and the XCentium team which I was privileged to lead.
You can download the full case study here, but here is a summary of the results:
- Delivered year over year revenue increase from online sales both in terms of revenue and number of orders
- Provided advanced online ordering capabilities for all devices
- Eliminated need to send guests to separate ordering portal
- Increased repeat customers and online sales
- Applebee’s: bounce rates down 22%; sessions up 31%; average session duration up 41%; pageviews up 67%.
- IHOP: bounce rates down 7%; sessions up 35%; average session duration up 17%; pageviews up 67%