Digitalisation key to preserving customer loyalty
Addressing gaps in brand consistency can strengthen customer loyalty.
It just takes two negative experiences for most consumers to abandon a trusted brand, highlighting the need for QSR brands to prioritise customer experience as a way to preserve customer loyalty.
Speaking to QSR brand leaders at The Future of QSR – Loyalty, Digitalisation, and Market Dynamics in 2025 webinar by QSR Media, Nick Mecozzi, SVP of Global Solutions Consulting at FranConnect, found that 88% of consumers would leave a trusted brand just after two negative experiences.
Mecozzi said operational digitalisation is key to proactively managing customer loyalty. He highlighted that whilst 80% of restaurants have adopted new technologies, many fail to effectively harness the operational data available. Mecozzi further explained that leveraging analytics and AI-driven insights allows brands to quickly identify and address operational gaps, enabling real-time actions that ensure consistent, positive customer experiences.
Mecozzi also emphasised the need to digitise all aspects of operations to help in the evaluation process as well as in identifying the gaps in brand consistency and operational compliance, which is the very foundation of customer loyalty. By gathering data, brands can quickly identify gaps and make decisions.
“That can be through the use of different tools like audits, daily checklists, daily logs, and incident tracking to get the data you need to make decisions. Then you can make use of the data that [to identify] where are the trends, where are the gaps?” Mecozzi said.
Mecozzi noted that brands could automate task assignments and corrective actions based on insights from field evaluations. He stressed the importance of adopting a mobile-first strategy, allowing evaluations and task management to be conducted seamlessly—even offline.
After finding the gaps, the next step is closing the loop to create a consistent customer experience across all restaurant locations and delivery channels as quickly as possible..
“For example, we may find that net promoter scores (NPS) are low for certain locations. This means customer satisfaction is not really high in those locations. What we can do is we can automatically gather those locations, put them in what we call a segment, and then launch a playbook to those locations [that helps them improve their NPS scores],” Mecozzi said.
Mecozzi also added that these playbooks can also be used by QSRs when they need to execute initiatives consistently across the organization, such as managing a rebrand or launching a new menu item, effectively optimising the performance of all stores.
“That’s the promise of digitalisation. So that the people that are supposed to solve these problems will be able to solve them in real time rather than wait for next week or next month, whenever it happens as well as check in on the status of the problem or initiative,” he added.
