How Adobe, Braze, Bloomreach, Optimove and CACI lead the way together

In today’s fast-paced digital world, customer engagement has evolved into a sophisticated science that requires real-time analysis and personalised interactions across multiple channels. Businesses are increasingly leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to optimise these processes, ensuring that customers receive relevant, timely, and personalised communication at scale.

Leading the charge in AI-driven customer engagement are platforms such as Adobe, Braze, Bloomreach, and Optimove. Each provides distinct features to make customer engagement more efficient and impactful. At CACI, we work alongside these providers, helping organisations across all sectors to integrate and fully leverage the capabilities of these technologies.

Navigating the latest AI features, ensuring seamless data integration, and delivering hyper-personalisation can quickly become overwhelming—especially when marketing teams are already stretched. Knowing where to begin, or how best to align new capabilities with business objectives, often proves challenging without expert guidance.

That’s why below I share an overview of how these leading platforms are incorporating AI to shape the future of customer marketing—and how our team of MarTech experts can support you in effectively putting these powerful features into action.

Adobe: The power of Predictive Analytics with Sensei

Adobe’s suite of marketing solutions, particularly within the Adobe Experience Cloud, utilises AI to enhance customer journeys. At the heart of this is Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework. Sensei powers several predictive analytics and personalisation features across Adobe’s platforms.

CACI can help you integrate Adobe Sensei with your existing marketing activities, enabling you to forecast customer behaviour, tailor content, and automate workflows. The result is a more personalised experience at scale for your customers, backed by the Adobe ecosystem’s powerful insights.

Braze: Real-Time optimisation with Intelligence Suite

Braze’s Intelligence Suite is a collection of AI-driven tools designed to make marketing more adaptive and responsive. Its Intelligent Channel feature automatically selects the best communication method based on customer behaviour, while Intelligent Timing determines the optimal time for engagement.

We can support you in adopting Braze by helping you configure Braze’s AI tools to match specific business objectives, ensuring that you maximise the return on investment in Braze. We will work closely with you to configure Braze’s AI tools, ensuring your multi-channel campaigns connect with customers in the right place, at the right time.

Bloomreach: Hyper-Personalisation with Bloomreach

Bloomreach combines commerce and marketing in one platform, with Bloomreach Engagement a leading player in AI-driven personalisation. Bloomreach Engagement in tandem with the commerce capabilities of Discovery continuously analyses customer intent and behaviour to adjust content and recommendations in real time.

We can assist you in seamlessly deploying Bloomreach Engagement, ensuring that the AI engine is fine-tuned to your unique needs. Through key data integrations we can enable you to create highly personalised digital experiences that improve conversion rates and customer engagement, leveraging Bloomreach’s AI to achieve fast, tangible results.

Optimove: Customer Data Platform meets AI with Optibot

Optimove’s Optibot is an AI-powered recommendation engine that helps marketers optimise their engagement strategies by providing actionable insights from customer data. It allows companies to predict customer behaviour, like churn or purchase intent, and adjust marketing tactics accordingly.

We can help you integrate Optimove and ensure you’re utilising Optibot’s AI-driven capabilities to their fullest potential. Through data analytics support and customer journey optimisation, we enable your organisation to fine-tune your outreach, engage customers more effectively, and enhance customer lifetime value through intelligent, data-driven marketing.

How CACI can help you to effectively apply AI tools

While each of these platforms offers powerful AI tools, integrating them into your organisation’s marketing efforts requires deep technical know-how and strategic insight.

We provide end-to-end support if you are looking to implement AI-driven marketing technologies. With a focus on data integration, customer journey mapping, and multi-channel engagement strategies, our team of experts will ensure that these AI tools align with your specific objectives and business model.

Whether it’s implementing AI-powered personalisation, automating decision-making processes, or scaling customer communications, we’re here to help you get the most out of your investment in AI.

By partnering with us, you gain access to a wealth of knowledge in deploying these technologies effectively, along with ongoing support to continuously optimise AI-driven marketing initiatives. We empower your organisation to move beyond manual processes, enabling you to focus on strategic growth while delivering personalised, relevant customer experiences at scale.

How can you get ahead?

The future of customer engagement marketing lies in AI, and companies like Adobe, Braze, Bloomreach and Optimove are leading the charge with innovative tools that make marketing more efficient and impactful.

CACI’s role is to help you harness these platforms effectively, tailoring them to your specific objectives and ensuring you capitalise on AI’s potential for personalisation, automation, and meaningful customer connections.

Whether you’re already using AI features in your existing MarTech stack or considering new solutions, we can guide you towards maximum return on your technology spend. If you’d like to explore your options or unlock more value from your current set-up, please get in touch—our team is here to help you navigate the next steps.

Setting the stage for AI and CRMs

The field of Machine learning and AI has evolved rapidly in the last few years, especially in fields where large quantities of data and quick response times to queries are crucial.

But given lots of these techniques and methods have been around for a much longer period, why has it taken so long for other industries outside of small start-ups and ambitious tech giants to leverage these methods in similar ways? 

CRM is an essential component of any company’s strategy. The ability to communicate with and understand customers is more important than ever due to the low barriers to entry in highly competitive global markets. Companies have only brief moments to convince customers that they are the right choice for shopping, spending time, or engaging. Optimising these initial and subsequent contacts is paramount to success. 

Beyond just expanding your customer base and attracting new clients, CRM is vital for any company’s retention strategy. The most advanced cutting-edge models in the world are utterly useless if we don’t know how to activate and capitalize on the value they represent. 

ML foundation for CRMs

In the CRM space our main goals are increasing consumer retention or spend, and we do this via figuring out the most effective ways to communicate with people. This can be broken down into when to speak to them, how to speak to them and why to speak to them.  

Recommendation engines lie at the core of many of these architectures, models that are designed to figure out what you want before you even know you want it. Broadly they work by looking at the kind of customer you are, then at customers like you, then finding things that they’ve bought recently that you haven’t.  

You can even simplify this down into just looking for customers who have an identical purchase history to you. Maybe a laptop you can buy on Amazon doesn’t come with a charger, so commonly when people buy this laptop their next purchase is a charger (You can often see this simple logic in the “People also bought” section of Amazon). But even these simple implementations are incredibly powerful in some ways, an educated guess is always going to be better than a random one. 

So how do these methods relate to CRM? Well, the general structure can be pulled away and applied to any subject.

When we think about how to engage with a customer, we’re going to look for ways we engaged with similar customers and how these performed. The customer who likes Sabrina Carpenter will probably need to be spoken to in a different way to the Motorhead fan. 

This is simple stuff, right? Well exactly, but it’s a method to show that the underlying AI processes in these platforms aren’t really all that complicated – there’s a lot of room for improvement especially when implementing bespoke solutions with larger data sets.  

The next (generative) step  

So, we already have ML methods that can tell us when and why to talk to people, great! But what’s the next step? 

All that’s left of our final stage is how to talk to them and what to say, stages which can and are currently being revolutionised by the advent of enterprise grade Generative AI. 

A current pipeline for devising CRM processes may involve creating template communications that are then populated with more specific information, for example customers in a certain segment defined by age and tenure are assigned one template and differing segments are shown another. 

This approach can be time consuming if it needs to be completed for each campaign, and may miss a level of personalisation that people will respond to, feeling as though each message is tailored to them rather than being an email blast they just happen to be caught up in. 

Skilled AI engineers armed with LLM’s can create a unique voice for each consumer, ensuring that quite literally all communication they will ever receive are exactly personalised to them and their engagement habits with your brand. 

Imagine attempting this even a few years ago, assigning a team of people to trawl through millions if not billions of rows of data to ensure that each customer got the perfect messaging for them would have been completely impossible. 

In practice this level of granularity in communications is probably unnecessary but it speaks to the potential these models have in this space – the sky truly is the limit. 

Even starting off small with these steps, giving a small part of a communication a generative component, allowing for large scale A/B testing and continuous model training, the effectiveness of these comms will improve over time. 

Freeing this time up from your CRM team will give them more time to tackle more involved problems that can’t be automated. 

If you need help on this journey for a better CRM, contact us here.

In the last part of our ongoing blog series exploring the Braze platform, we shared our key takeaways from this year’s Braze City x City London event. Today, I’ll dive into Braze’s various Canvas components and how you can leverage them to personalise your marketing journey.

What are Braze’s Canvas components?

By using a Canvas in Braze, you can unlock new user journeys that will improve processes and increase the effectiveness of reaching your audience. Here I break down a few of the Canvas components that enable a truly personalised marketing journey.

Action path

An Action path in a Canvas helps you to sort users based on their actions. By using an Action path, you can customise user paths based on custom events and engagement events and hold users for a given duration to prioritise their next path based on their actions during the evaluation window.

Within the Action setting module, you can choose how long you want to keep users in the Action step by choosing the evaluation window. This is set to one day by default, but can be customised to seconds, minutes, hours, days and even weeks.

Audience path

help narrow down and target users by sending users down different paths based on specific criteria such as age groups, country and even user preferences. An Audience path allows you to intuitively filter and segment users with a strategic priority-based user-grouping.

Imagine a sorting funnel with ranking criteria: users are evaluated for each criterion in a priority order and sent down the path of the highest-ranking criteria they qualify for. An Audience path allows for up to eight audience groups, and for each group, you can assign specific filters or segments.

The true power of an Audience path comes from its ability to assign priority, enabling you to target users that fall into specific filters and segments while still targeting users that might not fit those specific criteria all in one single Canvas component.

Decision Split

A Decision Split is a ‘yes or no’ feature that creates two mutually exclusive paths for users based on either an action or a user’s attributes, enabling a personalised, real-time experience for users. Within a Decision Split, you must use a segment or filter to create a ‘yes or no’ query to evaluate users.

An example of a Decision Split could be whether a customer is push enabled – ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In the case of a yes, the user would go down the push message path, and in the case of a no, users would go down an email path.

Delay components

help achieve the desired delay in communications, ensuring the user receives a message at a specific time and date (e.g. three-day delay) or holds users for a designated time. When using a delay step, it’s important to consider that the delay step’s limit is 30 days, and that a delay component can only be connected to one next step.

Experiment paths

allow you to test multiple Canvas paths against each other and a control group at any step level. It enables the random assigning of users down different paths, ensuring you can test which path is most effective.

As an example, if you want to test results between different time delays before a message after a user completes an action, you can do so while also setting a condition that after a specific experiment evaluation window, the winning path will be used, and the other paths ignored.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, our multidisciplined team can help you get the most out of Braze and customise your marketing journey to resonate with your customers. If you’re looking to adopt Braze or are already a Braze user, contact us to find out how you can start enhancing your marketing journey by harnessing Braze’s Canvas components.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

In our last article, we explored how brands can utilise Braze’s Sage AI suite to enhance their audience engagement. Now, we’ll be diving into one of Braze’s newest Experiment Path features, Winning Paths, to find out how it can help nurture audiences and enable marketers to make impactful decisions at any point along the multi-touch journey.

How does Braze’s Experiment Path work?

In the ever-evolving world of digital optimisation, the ability to leverage data-driven insights is a deal-breaker. Braze’s Experiment Path node enables testing delivery time, messaging cadence, channel combinations and much more against earlier defined conversion events by randomly assigning users to different paths (or an optional control group).  

This functionality was designed to streamline testing efforts and automatically send the most engaged users through subsequent steps. While it’s especially beneficial when setting up recurring or triggered canvases, it can also be used when setting up a single-entry flow.  

If the initial test results are not statistically significant and the Winning Path wasn’t determined, Braze will direct users towards the best-performing path to ensure the most relevant experience. Alternatively, marketers can choose to distribute volume and allow customers to continue further down by following percentage splits specified at the beginning of the experiment. 

For single-entry canvases, Braze will automatically apply a Delay Group that will separate randomly assigned users, while the rest will follow down the experiment paths. When the test is complete, the Delay Group will be connected to the Winning Path and continue through the canvas. 

How is Winning Paths implemented?

To implement Winning Paths, follow the steps below:

1. Add in the Experiment Path to your flow by using the drag and drop canvas builder. By default, there are two paths with 50% of eligible audiences split between each path.
2. Next, simply tailor distribution for up to four variants and activate Winning Path in Settings by toggling on the feature.
3. Lastly, define the conversion event that will determine the results and set the timeframe to define how long the experiment will run before the top performing flow is selected.  

The experiment window begins when the first user enters the step, and the start can be triggered earlier than expected by users in early time zones if they’re using local time delivery. When setting up the experiment, considering time differences is imperative, as is considering the impact of setting shorter timeframes. If local delivery time is enabled, we recommend setting an experiment window of at least 24-48 hours to give all customers an equal opportunity to interact and eventually convert.

Why Winning Paths will make a difference for your brand

Winning Paths is a fantastic way to enrich your brand’s testing strategy, connect with your customers and help you better understand microtrends among audiences flowing through lifecycle or BAU journeys. This functionality will ultimately allow marketers to run multiple tests in parallel and define successful ways to build meaningful connections.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, our multidisciplined team can help you maximise your Braze experience value and help you connect with your customers like never before. If you’re looking to adopt Braze or are already a Braze user, get in touch with us to find out how you can implement Winning Paths to bolster your testing and customer engagement strategies.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Braze or if you’re a Braze user looking to maximise value, please reach out to us.

Continue reading:

Blog 1 – Exploring Braze: optimising your CRM by leveraging key features

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Braze is one of the fastest growing CRM tools on the market. It enables brands to be truly app-first and deliver enhanced and personalised real-time customer experiences without complex and bulky ETL or batch processes which often involve painful and delayed overnight data loads.  

Leveraging effective marketing technology is now critical for a business’ long-term success. It allows businesses to stay ahead of the competition by understanding and adapting to everchanging consumer behaviours and tailoring experiences that best reflect their needs. 

Braze is a leading platform in the CRM space, having recently been scored as ‘leader’ within The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs in Q1 of 2023. Its innovative approach to connecting with customers has been a gamechanger. With a particular focus on digital messaging, it has established itself as an accessible, customisable and specialised tool on a global scale.  

In this blog series, my multidisciplined team will lift the lid on Braze and uncover the key features we see within the platform that are certain to deliver growth and take your use of Braze to new heights.

Our partnership with Braze

As a trusted Braze partner, we help brands get the most from the platform by supporting in all areas, from platform integration and audit to campaign management and optimisation. Our Campaign Operations team is well versed in the platform, with each member who interacts with Braze being certified in the platform. We invest in our partnership with Braze by further upskilling our team to a high standard, with multiple team members holding more than three different certifications ranging from the marketer exam to the digital strategist, enabling us to support brands in getting the most out of this amazing platform.

Our experiences and certifications have enabled our development of a set of Braze Accelerators specifically designed for CRM teams striving to achieve better results in a shorter timeframe. They have also contributed to our team being awarded Agency Partner of the Year in 2022 for our work with Domino’s in assessing their campaigns, enhancing their understanding of their customers’ behaviours and identifying personalisation opportunities that bolstered their testing capabilities and paved the way for more effective outcomes.

If you’re interested in learning more about Braze, and how CACI can help you in driving the most value from your Braze investment, be sure to get in touch with us.

Continue reading:

Blog 2 – How to elevate your brand through the power of Braze’s Sage AI suite

Blog 3 – Leveraging Braze’s Winning Paths to augment Canvas performance

Blog 4 – CACI’s Braze City x City 2023 takeaways

Blog 5 – How Braze’s Canvas components personalise marketing journeys

Climate change is an ever-growing problem, and the technology sector is unfortunately playing a substantial role in this. By 2040, this sector is set to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint, a massive uptake from the 1.5% it occupied in 2007. Understanding how businesses operating within the technology sector can analyse and reduce their carbon footprint and leverage green information technology (also known as green IT) practices is critical. So, what exactly is green IT and how will this shape the future of this sector’s carbon footprint?

This is the first part of a 4-blog series on Green IT. In future posts, we will discuss how businesses can use green IT to reduce their carbon footprint, choose the right cloud provider, and optimise algorithms for energy efficiency.

What is green information technology (Green IT)?

Green information technology (green IT) is the practice of using environmentally sustainable computing. It aims to minimise the effects of the technology space on global emissions to combat climate change. The concept originated from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 through a project called “Energy Star”, which identified products that were superior in energy efficiency and helped organisations choose products that would cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint.

Why is green IT so important?

Green IT will have significant impacts in areas beyond climate change, including:

Compliance to achieve net zero carbon emissions

Recent updates made to the Green Finance Strategy from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will ensure businesses continue to meet their green finance ambitions and standards. Climate change has remained a prominent consideration within this. The FCA recognises the importance of business’ resilience in collective action to achieve net zero carbon emissions, therefore, businesses are being held increasingly accountable for any climate-related actions.

Competitive advantage through ESG scores

Businesses worldwide have increasingly focused on achieving environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to prove they have adopted good sustainability practices. ESG criteria assess a company’s environmental risks and potential harm to the environment. ESG scores are calculated for individual businesses based on relative performance within the company’s sector (for environmental and social) and country of incorporation (for governance). Businesses that receive a positive ESG score are ultimately more attractive to customers and investors.

What can your business do to follow Green IT best practices?

While the UK is considered the second most environmentally friendly country in the world according to the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), ongoing environmental challenges call all organisations to continue to innovate and act.

Businesses may be daunted by the fact that an eco-conscious development strategy is not easy, cheap, and will not happen overnight. Technology solutions can also be highly complex, with many parts to manage and design, which can also complicate the ability to determine the impact the solution may have on climate change. Setting policies and best practices for a business to follow is a good first step, and everyone in the business must bear some level of responsibility to help drive green IT, from the CTO to the engineers and architects.

There are several key takeaways that the wider business should consider to effectively implement and follow green IT best practices, most notably:

Demand for the information and technology sector is only going to increase, making it a massive contributing factor to climate change.

Embed green methodologies and practices into the software development lifecycle to set clear goals to help mitigate carbon footprints.

Make informed decisions on what tooling and infrastructure is going to be utilised.

More research and innovation need to happen, especially in cloud computing and analytical developmental tools.

This blog is part 1 of a 2-part blog series exploring the topic of Green IT. You can read the other 2 parts by following the below links:

• What is green cloud computing & how are businesses using it?

To learn more about green IT and how your business can adopt these best practices, contact us today.

CACI is proud to announce that we have been awarded Adobe’s Digital Experience Emerging Partner of the Year 2023. Adobe’s Digital Experience partner awards acknowledge companies that have made significant contributions to Adobe’s business and have had a significant impact on customer success.

To secure this award, the team at CACI has demonstrated a strong level of investment and engagement in the Adobe partnership. This is measured through solution licensing, services, and the number of certifications and specializations held. We have also worked closely with Adobe to ensure that our relationship is of the highest quality and that we are working together to drive value for our clients.

We are thrilled to have received this recognition, and it highlights our commitment to providing exceptional services to our clients. The award was announced at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and we are excited to share this news with our clients and partners. CACI will be present at Adobe Summit UK this June and we look forward to seeing you there. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you’d like to meet at the event.

David Sealey, Director of Strategy and Growth at CACI, said,

“Adobe’s solutions to deliver enhanced customer experiences are an essential part of our market offering. I’m delighted that this award recognizes the hard work of CACI’s commercial and delivery team as they implement, optimize, and support brands with Adobe. It’s also important to acknowledge the importance of our clients who have the vision and determination to deliver better experiences to their customers.”

CACI’s expertise with Adobe extends across Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and the Adobe Experience Platform. Our focus for 2023 and 2024 is to help organizations evolve their Adobe stack in pursuit of greater performance, reliability, and the ability to launch new use cases.

Should you wish to find out more about CACI’s services for Adobe products, please feel free to get in touch.

With new guidance in the FCA’s Consumer Duty directive, the financial services industry is being asked to get to know their customer better and meet their diverse needs. In a recent report produced by Braze & CACI, providing insight for financial services brands, it was found that 42% of EMEA consumers only use one financial services brand – so how can you retain their loyalty, trust and keep them engaged? 

Technology innovation

The general insurance market has always been challenged with engagement, as the frequency of communication with its policy holders is low and concentrated at the point of policy inception, claim or renewal.  

However, building trust is still crucial in this market. 

Every insurer is now looking for new ways to harness technology for growth and competitive advantage. The use of AI and innovative tools is becoming more prevalent in the underwriting, claims and CRM process.  

Harnessing your customer data through modern decisioning tools, and leveraging third-party demographic data to build a more holistic understanding of who your customer is, enables you to interject hyper personalised communications throughout the life of the policy, via the most appropriate channels, and actively give policy holders transparency over potential changes in premium. 

Building trust  

Whilst insurance may be seen as a “necessary purchase”, the payments aren’t usually greeted with good sentiment or the feeling of value for money. 

However, the data and insights that much of this new technology generates creates the opportunity to engage policy holders more during the life of their policy.  

For example, in car insurance, the use of telematics data could be used to talk to customers regularly about how they can improve their driving whilst reducing the cost at their next renewal. It’s well understood that people feel a sense of dread when a renewal comes around, fearing a policy price increase without a clear reason. As an insurer, why not reduce this surprise and help your customers maintain or reduce their premium? 

If the data used to run the underwriting model changes, meaning that the car insurance policy may go up at renewal, it is better to let the customer know this early and explain why this has happened. This would increase trust and loyalty, reducing the likelihood that they might go to an aggregator when the renewal is due.  

Even better, utilise predictive analytics to warn customers early of changes, enabling them to make changes in behaviour to help keep premiums down. 

Understand your competition 

The insurance market is made up of large general insurers through to niche specialists. Whilst brand reputation has a role to play, the heavy use of aggregators to seek out favourable deals is commonplace.  

The opportunity is there for the more established brands to innovate and use their capability to invest in and truly leverage marketing technology and data to create a more trustworthy experience. For niche players, they can utilise their positioning to clearly communicate the benefits of their USP to customers. 

With restrictions on the use of incentives for new consumers, all insurers need to consider other important elements of their offering and communicate this throughout the experience. 

Throughout this blog series for the financial service industry, we break down the opportunities for marketers to build trust, loyalty and a superior customer experience with data and technology.

Continue reading at the links below: 

Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market

Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing

Report – Banking on the Customer Journey: 2022 Financial Services Insights

Even before social distancing changed the hospitality industry, some businesses like Mitchells & Butlers were already responding to customer demands for quicker and easier ordering.

For example, an order-at-table app – enabling customers to choose and pay for their food and beverages without leaving their table – is an essential part of the new, contactless pub experience. Done well, it’s also convenient for the customer who no longer has to wait for service or queue at a bar. It’s great for the pub too – helping to improve efficiency and boost revenue.

Since 2017, we’ve been working with Mitchells & Butlers to develop, integrate, and refine an order-at-table app which is now available in five of their leading brands – O’Neill’s, All Bar One, Ember Inns, High Street, and Sizzling Pubs, making up around 25% of the company’s near 1,700 venues.

In that time, we’ve learnt important lessons about what makes a great at-table app that keeps customers coming back for more. So if you’re in the process of adapting your own hospitality experience to make it more contactless, here are four key elements to bear in mind.

Real-time stock control integration is essential

Picture this: you’ve ordered food at a bar, only to be told a few minutes later that your choice isn’t available today. And then, under pressure, you choose something else which isn’t quite what you wanted. It’s frustrating to say the least. And while the bar tender could have told you your meal was out of stock at the time, they just didn’t have access to that information in the moment.

The same goes for an at-table ordering app. Without real time stock information, you risk frustrating and disappointing your customers, and creating unnecessary workload.

That’s why Mitchells & Butlers prioritised integrating its order-at-table app with the latest point of sale and stock control data to maintain an accurate menu that self-edits based on real-time product availability.

It also pays to keep out-of-stock items on the app menu – either crossed or blocked out – so your customers can still see what’s normally available to give them inspiration for next time.

Put the customer in control

Customers are leading increasingly busy lives, so offering the same choice and flexibility that they’d expect from face-to-face bar staff can be a significant competitive differentiator.

By giving customers more options at each stage of the ordering process, you can give them greater flexibility.

For example, a customer may have had their starter and main course, but now wants to take their dessert home. By offering the option to change part of their order at any stage, you’re giving them more options.

This helps to ensure the customer goes away happy, having had the experience they really want. And because you’ve made ordering that much easier, it can even increase your average transaction value.

Simplicity is the key to a great user experience

When thinking about your app’s customer journey – including how it looks and feels – the process should be no less convenient than choosing from a physical menu and relaying their order to a server.

So, while it’s important to give your customers a wide range of options at each stage, your user journey should be concise, with the ability to select products and pay for an order in as few steps as possible – without the risk of payment errors or double charges.

Also, bear in mind that journey starts before they even download your app. It needs to be easy to find and recognise in their app store, and enable them to get started quickly.

It’s this kind of thinking that refined each of the Mitchells & Butlers brand app s, leading to significantly higher user uptake.

The right technology partner can make all the difference

Delivering a great digital experience that works for both you and your customers relies on having the right technology, and choosing a partner that’s got experience creating customer-centric apps.

It’s important to look for a partner that understands your ethos and exactly what you’re trying to achieve – and one with a team that can work with your own IT staff to help ensure seamless back-end integrations and a clear project roadmap.

Putting the customer first benefits everyone

Bringing technology like order-at-table apps into a pub environment shouldn’t just be seen as a solution to recent social distancing changes. Rather, it’s an opportunity to take a more customer-centric approach to digital transformation; start from the experience your customer wants, and build from there.

That includes listening and learning to what your customers are saying after you’ve launched. It’s important to test and learn from the results – making continual iterations as you go to refine and improve the experience.

If you’d like to find out more about our work with Mitchells & Butlers – or if you’d like to talk more about getting the most from an at-table ordering app – get in touch with our team of experts today.