McDonald’s is famous for cheeseburgers and fries, but with 1.5 million customers a day, and each transaction producing 20 to 30 data points, it has also become a technology organization. With the overarching goal to improve customer experience, and as a byproduct increase conversion and brand loyalty, McDonald’s France partnered with 2nd Watch to build a data lake on AWS.
Customer Priorities Require Industry Shifts
As is common in many industries today, the fast-food industry has shifted from a transaction centric view to a customer centric view. The emphasis is no longer on customer satisfaction, but on customer experience. It’s this variable that impacts conversion rate and instills loyalty. Consequently, McDonald’s wanted to build a complete perspective of a customer’s lifetime value, with visibility into each step of their journey. Understanding likes and dislikes based on data would give McDonald’s the opportunity to improve experience at a variety of intersections across global locations.
McDonald’s is a behemoth in its size, multi-national reach, and the abundance of data it collects. Making sense of that data required a new way of storing and manipulating it, with flexibility and scalability. The technology necessary to accomplish McDonald’s data goals has significantly reduced in cost, while increasing in efficiency – key catalysts for initiating the project within McDonald’s groups, gaining buy-in from key stakeholders, and engaging quickly.
From Datacenter to Data Lake
To meet its data collection and analysis needs, McDonald’s France needed a fault-tolerant data platform equipped with data processing architecture and a loosely coupled distribution system. But, the McDonald’s team needed to focus on data insights rather than data infrastructure, so they partnered with 2nd Watch to move from a traditional data warehouse to a data lake, allowing them to reduce the effort required to analyze or process data sets for different properties and applications.
During the process, McDonald’s emphasized the importance of ongoing data collection from anywhere and everywhere across their many data sources. From revenue numbers and operational statistics to social media streams, kitchen management systems, commercial, regional, and structural data – they wanted everything stored for potential future use. Historical data will help to establish benchmarks, forecast sales projections, and understand customer behavior over time.
The Data Challenges We Expect…And More
With so much data available, and the goal of improving customer experience as motivation, McDonald’s France wanted to prioritize three types of data – sales, speed of service, and customer experience. Targeting specific sets of data helps to reduce the data inconsistencies every organization faces in a data project. While collecting, aggregating, and cleaning data is a huge feat on its own, McDonald’s France also had to navigate a high level of complexity.
As an omnichannel restaurant, McDonald’s juggles information from point of sales systems with sales happening online, offline, and across dozens of different locations. Data sources include multiple data vendors, mobile apps, loyalty programs, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and other digital interfaces. Combined in one digital ecosystem, this data is the force that drives the entire customer journey. Once it’s all there, the challenge is to find the link for any given customer that transforms the puzzle into a holistic picture.
Endless Opportunities for the Future
McDonald’s France now has visibility into speed of service with a dedicated dashboard and can analyze and provide syntheses of that data. National teams can make data-based, accurate decisions using the dashboard and implement logistical changes in operations. They’re able to impact operational efficiency using knowledge around prep time to influence fulfilment.
The data lake was successful in showing the organization where it was losing opportunities by not taking advantage of the data it had. McDonald’s also proved it was possible, affordable, and advantageous to invest in data. While their data journey has only begun, these initial steps opened the door to new data usage possibilities. The models established by McDonald’s France will be used as an example to expand data investments throughout the McDonald’s corporation.
If your organization is facing a similar of issue of too much data and not enough insight, 2nd Watch can help. Our data and analytics solutions help businesses make better decisions, faster, with a modern data stack in the cloud. Contact Us to start talking about the tools and strategies necessary to reach your goals.
-Ian Willoughby, Chief Architect and Vice President
Listen to the McDonald’s team talk about this project on the 2nd Watch Cloud Crunch podcast.
