Potbelly Sandwich Shop this month unveiled a brand-new mobile app and website, tearing down the tech stack it’s had since 2017 and erecting a built-from-scratch system in its place.
The chain wanted to break away from its former white-labeled solution in favor of something more customized, aesthetically pleasing and, most importantly, easier for customers to use, said Jeff Douglas, Potbelly’s chief information officer.
“We wanted to go from the ground up and to build a solution that gave [customers] the maximum amount of flexibility,” he said.
Here’s a look at Potbelly’s new system and the strategy behind it.
Enhancing the order flow
User experience was the guiding factor behind Potbelly’s new digital storefront.
“Let’s just make this really easy, whether you’re a guest user or a loyal user, to interact with us, but give you a rich experience in the application,” Douglas said of the chain’s thinking.
One noticeable change is that customers can now browse the menu without starting an order. A clean-looking menu page lists each of the chain’s 19 sandwiches along with a photo and brief description; clicking on one of them takes the user to an ordering page where they can customize the item.
The new interface also makes it easier for customers to re-order past meals, “without having to go through three or four clicks,” Douglas said. And it more clearly indicates whether a loyalty member has a reward available, like a free cookie.
It also has a more robust upsell function. Potbelly’s former system had a rudimentary upsell tool that would suggest the same items to every customer at the end of the ordering process. The new properties include nudges along the way based on what a customer puts in their cart—if they order a sandwich, for instance, a pop-up asks if they want to make it a meal by adding chips, soup or a cookie. In the future, Potbelly’s upsell will become even more dynamic by taking into account individual customers’ order history, Douglas said.
Potbelly worked with developer WillowTree to build the new website and app. The custom approach gave Potbelly more control over what the sites look like and how they work, compared to the more templated architecture of its old system.
Integrated ordering
On the restaurant end, Potbelly partnered with Olo to bring all of its digital ordering channels—web, app and third-party orders—into a single channel, reducing the number of tablets in its stores and making things easier for employees.
"They’re managing all digital orders, catering, marketplace, or our own branded digital channels, all through that single interface," Douglas said.
Beefed-up loyalty
Potbelly launched a new loyalty program about a year ago that gives customers points with every dollar spent. That hasn’t changed under the chain’s new system, but the technology behind it has. Potbelly is using a customer relationship management platform from Paytronix to engage its loyalty members better and more frequently. The system can tell, for instance, whether a customer has not visited for 30 days or 60 days and interact with them accordingly.
The goal is to both increase the chain’s pool of loyalty members as well as to get them to order more often.
"However you want to take a look at it, we can target customers in a more granular, detailed way," Douglas said.
Passing the test
Testing is key when it comes to introducing any new technology. Typically, Potbelly likes to roll out new initiatives one region at a time, giving it a chance to work out any kinks along the way. But because of how things were configured in this case, all of its approximately 450 stores had to go live at the same time. That meant testing had to be mostly internal, Douglas said, limited to the developers and staffers’ family and friends.
That group uncovered a few bugs, and the company made some tweaks to the order flow and timing around delivery, but “nothing that caused us to go back and erase the whiteboard,” he said.
The system has been live for just over two weeks, and Douglas said it’s too early to evaluate how it’s going. Conversion rates and order size compared to the old app will be the key benchmarks for success, he said.