Global UX, Local Activation: How KFC Maintains Brand Consistency Across 1,000+ Locations

[00:00:00] Stephane Godoy: You have an app that can manage time of day order type, who is buying your segmentation, in which moment, which product? When’s the best part to show something to a customer? It’s not about the speed to check out, it’s the speed to confidence. How do we give, to customers, the confidence that our digital app and our channels that are connected through that is the easiest, frictionless way to order something.

[00:00:35] Brian Quinn: For many omnichannel leaders, the challenge isn’t just building a mobile app. It’s proving that it can drive measurable results across a complex physical footprint. It’s exactly what KFC has solved. In many regions that they operate across a digital ecosystem, moving beyond simply an ordering app, to creating an ecosystem that often predicts what customer needs are before they arrive.

[00:01:00] Brian Quinn: Today we’re talking with Stephane Godoy, who heads up digitization and e-commerce at KFC. He’s going to break down how KFC turned its app into a core growth channel across Latin America, across 1,000 locations, how they’ve used personalization and loyalty to deliver real results and shape what comes next.

[00:01:23] Brian Quinn: This conversation is a masterclass of data-driven marketing and change management. Stephane, thanks for being here. 

[00:01:32] Stephane Godoy: Thank you. Thank you, BQ, for inviting me. 

[00:01:34] Brian Quinn: Let’s, let’s jump in and give us a 60-second sort of primer. I think people hear mobile first, and they’re a bit familiar with the Lang, the lingo, but beyond just having an app, what does it mean for an organization?

[00:01:49] Brian Quinn: What does it mean to the structure of your team for digital transformation? 

[00:01:53] Stephane Godoy: What mobile first means, it’s that the organization thinks digitally first before making decision. And this has a lot of sense and branches on how you work it, how you structure teams, how you make decisions. What you need to have is a cross-functional channel team.

[00:02:12] Brian Quinn: Now you’re based in Mexico City and you’ve done this across seven markets, and I think more than 23 brands. Give us and the audience a view of how it works differently in Latin America as it would in the US market. 

[00:02:59] Stephane Godoy: In Latin America, you actually have to create new legacy behaviors. In the US, you have these legacy behaviors are already set.

[00:03:09] Stephane Godoy: So what, what you have in LATAM is actually digitalizing not only your company, but you have to digitalize people and create these new ways of interactive, which Latin American markets were not used to. 

[00:03:24] Brian Quinn: So let’s talk a little about the app. When you started in the role, what sort of dynamic changed? 

[00:03:29] Stephane Godoy: So we started seeing that aggregators were starting, owning that the customer relationship, that people were starting engaging with apps that for the first time ever you could have a channel that gives you end-to-end visibility.

[00:03:43] Stephane Godoy: Once all these different parameters about what was happening on digital was understood, our leadership could actually see the full picture. And understood that mobile was not an option anymore because before, how, how, how was the app seen? We talk about mobile first, like a marketing channel, a convenience feature or maybe a tech cost.

[00:04:05] Stephane Godoy: But once you see the full picture, that’s when everything, it’s seen as an holistic view. 

[00:04:12] Brian Quinn: I see. And that changed sort of the mindset inside the business and within leadership?

[00:04:17] Stephane Godoy: What makes leadership actually take importance into this? See this is a real role. See digital as the growth engine, especially the app is when you have the clarity to understand what does this bring to the table, not only on sales, not only on delivery.

[00:04:34] Stephane Godoy: Stop seeing the app as a sales channel or delivery channels. It’s actually what connects every other channel that you have, and it becomes the heart of it. 

[00:04:44] Brian Quinn: And, and give us a little bit of the behind the scenes sort of unit economics of driving consumer behavior. Is this a capability that you and, and, and features?

[00:04:53] Brian Quinn: Is it a marketing strategy? Tell us about how, you know, what’s behind the scenes there. 

[00:04:58] Stephane Godoy: The biggest cost was in technology. It was changing management in prioritizing how the team works. The first thing is changing this perception that technology is a cost, but it’s an investment. So once you see it as an investment, you have these timelines and where it will return on this compound time.

[00:05:20] Stephane Godoy: All the other above that I just told you. So when you see technology as an investment in unit economics, you’ll see that it’s a code that will bring back on these four parameters. You have higher average ticket, you’ll have better sales, less service, less line connecting to the customer, modernizing, your brand, but most importantly, all the data you have end to end from your customer up to each channel or every store.

[00:05:46] Brian Quinn: Okay, so on the thread of, of viewing technology as an investment, many QSR food companies, they’re, they’re wrapping their website in their app. You, you didn’t do that, right? You, you built a, a, an experience from the ground up. Can you give us a sense of a product decision or a strategy early on that helped differentiate your app experience?

[00:06:10] Stephane Godoy: We designed for context, not for pages. We focus that the app has to adapt to this location of the customers. So going through products, you have an app that can manage time, of day, order type, who is buying your segmentation, in which moment, which product, when’s the best part to show something to a customer and store capacity.

[00:06:33] Stephane Godoy: When you focus on this, it’s easier to actually understand that it’s not about the speed to checkout, it’s the speed to confidence. So we have actually focused on how do we give, to customers, the confidence that our digital app and our channels that are connected through that. It’s the easiest frictionless way order something.

[00:06:56] Brian Quinn: A lot of folks listening to this will be building their first app. If there’s one piece of advice you can give to those early days, what would it be? 

[00:07:05] Stephane Godoy: Reduce cognitive load. The best app or the best mobile source that you launch on digital doesn’t make people think. It’s an app that allows customers to flow so similarly that they don’t think when they’re purchasing.

[00:07:20] Stephane Godoy: So reduce this cognitive loadve, likeet, don’t show many things or try to put the brand in, but also the product, but also the sign in, but also the opt-in, but also the rewards that you have. Because then the app becomes something promotional and the app is actually an engine that goes across channels. 

[00:07:37] Brian Quinn: So let’s shift gears a bit.

[00:07:38] Brian Quinn: Because, you know, I think in, in my, in my view, a great app isn’t just to transact or whatever, it’s an opportunity to build a relationship with a customer. You guys really have invested into personalization, into loyalty programs. Are you looking at sort of the engagement that it, that it, that it brings in and of itself into other channels or the frequency or what are some of the sort of metrics that you, the app helps the broader ecosystem?

[00:08:07] Stephane Godoy: When you wanna bring more people to our drive-through, loyalty is the channel, because you give benefits, you give rewards based on time of the day, occasion, special days, especially on that channel. But it’s only available through the app. So that’s how you digitalize someone ’cause you have a benefit.

[00:08:27] Stephane Godoy: You have a reward on the opt-in. Doesn’t matter which channel you use. Same thing happens on the connection that we have when the app and our kiosk. That it allows people to sign in and see our recommendations. It gives us a better upsell, a better cross sell, a better understanding of our segmentation.

[00:08:47] Stephane Godoy: It actually gives us a higher average ticket. It allow us to have access to better deals, not cheap ones. And I think that’s a key factor for us when we see loyalty. Loyalty is not about discounts. Loyalty is not about having something free. Loyalty is a way of creating these behaviors of our customers.

[00:09:08] Stephane Godoy: We call them KFC behaviors. So we create these ones which bring us frequency. It actually bring us recency. It allows us to win back churn users or the one that’s for acquisition or for new ones. And once that strategy is done, digital first for loyalty, it goes directly to all the other channels that we have.

[00:09:31] Brian Quinn: Now, give us an example if you would, around personalization, right? Is there something specific you’ve done that’s really had a meaningful impact on the business? 

[00:09:39] Stephane Godoy: Once you understand that personalization, it’s not about surveillance, it’s about service, the game changes. So to give you a few examples, how do we show the right offer to the right person at the right moment in the right channel?

[00:09:55] Stephane Godoy: I’ll give you an example. It’s not the same thing to show an abandoned cart offer to a family of four that only buy on Tuesdays every one week, that an offer at the mealtime for someone that’s an individual user and has only bought me three times. And once we find common pattern, that becomes our audience. And then it’s behavioral trigger. 

[00:10:21] Brian Quinn: Let’s shift gears again. So everything we’ve talked about for a lot of businesses, building apps is, is already difficult. You now are doing this across a complex physical footprint, lots of different stores, and on top of that your business is dealing with a lot of franchises.

[00:10:40] Brian Quinn: If if, if I, if I’m correct. Right. So, yes. I’d love you to share with us a little bit about what you’ve learned in terms of rolling out this digital experience and the complexity of multiple markets, physical locations, and franchise ownership. 

[00:10:56] Stephane Godoy: We usually create people processes, which is the most important part.

[00:11:00] Stephane Godoy: We take pilot markets, which is really important because on these pilot markets, usually technology scales faster than the training that you have. That’s why we, we, we pick two different type of pilots on a bigger market, on smaller market, and that’s how you become consistent on how you’re gonna approach being mobile first and digitalization.

[00:11:21] Stephane Godoy: But the important part of this is that yes, you have a standardized global experience, but the activation will always be local. You have to tropicalize everything that’s global because a global standard for a market as a QSR will not work. Ecuador is really different than Mexico. Any Asia country is way different than the ones in Europe.

[00:11:49] Stephane Godoy: So each one of those do have to do a local activation, and that’s when the UX changes the product. The digital vision changes across the globe because you have to activate it. Local vision, the needs and behavior and audiences you have on each country. 

[00:12:07] Brian Quinn: Like many app businesses, you’re collecting a lot of data right?

[00:12:10] Brian Quinn: From, from customers, from the business itself. How is the data informing strategy decisions? Can you talk about how that’s kind of helped you optimize on an operational sense? Tell, tell us about sort of like the insights that you get from owning this program and, and, and you know, how it’s guiding the business decisions? 

[00:12:29] Stephane Godoy: When you have all the data on, on, on digital first, you not only have the name or the email, you actually have it’s geolocation. You have the time of the day that they order. What do they order, which type of events they do. If they are only selecting a product, be on a product, an abandon in the cart, doing the checkout, understanding this part.

[00:12:54] Stephane Godoy: Then you divide it into your occasions, what’s happening at breakfast, what’s happening at lunch, what’s happening at dinner. After you understand the data with this, you understand how much of your business you are not getting. So this data actually allows us to create the product that the customer is already ordering.

[00:13:11] Stephane Godoy: We’re just matching up the data and once you create the product based on data, our launches, our calendars, our new introductions come from this data. So the product is based on the main product that you have on your upsell, on your cross-sell. And once you can see each transaction, once you find these patterns, your whole calendar and all your products are made from this data.

[00:13:35] Stephane Godoy: And then on communications, once you understand that you can actually have more than. 70 to 100 campaigns ongoing to a different segment, to a different individual. With this hyper-personalization that we were talking about, you’ll actually understand your A/B testings. You can test your arts, you can test your new products, you can test your new launches, and all of this comes from the data we are gathering from the app.

[00:14:00] Brian Quinn: Amazing. Sounds incredibly sort of mature and, and, and professional the way that you’ve, that you’ve organized this. I, I know innovation and testing and learning is really, really central to a lot of your success. Let’s talk about that, ’cause that’s also rooted in data. How do you decide what to innovate and test, talk about experimentation, if you’ve got anything that sort of didn’t work or flopped.

[00:14:24] Brian Quinn: We always love hearing, you know, those kind of stories, but what, how do you think about, you know, bringing out new innovation to, to your, your consumers? 

[00:14:32] Stephane Godoy: We have three main pillars so we can prioritize this. The first one is customer friction. If anything is causing customer friction or if we can create something that allow us to mitigate customer friction, that’s our number one.

[00:14:46] Stephane Godoy: The second is business impact. Which type of developments we need to do that we impact the business in, in, in a bigger amount. And the last one is operational feasibility. It’s really important that what we do on digital, not only app, allow us to make a simpler operation, not only for our customers, but for our own employees inside operations.

[00:15:10] Stephane Godoy: When everything regarding AI was being talked about, having natural languages and chatbots, we actually thought that having a chatbot as QSR will allow us to mitigate the customer demands. It flopped on everything. But it allows us to learn that people want to buy as fast as possible, but they need someone to complain to.

[00:15:33] Stephane Godoy: And as a quick service restaurant, a natural language road will not be sufficient to actually take the complaints. And that, I think this is a, a huge remark for everybody that’s listening. Don’t try to put complaints yet on a chatbot. 

[00:15:51] Brian Quinn: What are you doing from an AI perspective that’s sort of pilot and experimentation?

[00:15:56] Brian Quinn: What sort of production level, if you will, what’s kind of deployed where you’re seeing benefits and maybe like what is one surprising idea or, or, or use case or workflow that that AI has really, you know, made possible for you? 

[00:16:12] Stephane Godoy: So we actually have these AI agents on our algorithms that allow us to understand from all of our customer database that we’ve managed to do through digital across the years, how do you actually have a prediction and churn it allow us to understand what made someone churn.

[00:16:31] Stephane Godoy: And I think this, this is really important to, to everyone listening, digital. It’s not the only way to not lose customers. So what do I mean with this? We found out with this term prediction, how much. The restaurant was causing this churn from the app. And I’ll give you an example. You can have any communications, the best UX you could have, but if your restaurant is not sending the correct product, you have defect rates.

[00:17:01] Stephane Godoy: If the delivery time takes too much time and you lose customers, and even if you use loyalty, if you do cross channels campaigns, if the app is your engine, you lose those customers. 

[00:17:14] Brian Quinn: Tell me from a, a, a customer standpoint, right, you know, in, in the QSR space, predictive ordering and smart menus, or there’s, there’s, you know, a lot of talk around that.

[00:17:24] Brian Quinn: Are we there yet? Is that a couple years out? What, what’s, what, what, where is AI in the actual product experience? 

[00:17:32] Stephane Godoy: So on the product experience, I think the QSR markets of, of many brands we we’re, we are really ahead of how you can use AI. So our recommendations, quick samples. You open a bucket of eight, you’ll get AI recommendation of what should be your absolute cross, all based on who you are.

[00:17:52] Stephane Godoy: When you have perfect predictions based on your behavior or based on what we have, you still need human judgment and human strategy behind that on having different menus. Depending on the person who has seen it, we have different recommendations, promotions, and offers. What we don’t have is a menu that varies dynamically based on who’s seeing us.

[00:18:20] Stephane Godoy: I think that’s where we’re actually where we should go and where AI is gonna go. Because if you compare where we are today to where we should go, so our menu should not be a menu board. We should have the simplest products or the most complex one depending on the person. This will simplify our operations and allow us to show each person what they need in the right time with our right channel.

[00:18:47] Brian Quinn: Got it. Okay. Before we wrap, I wanna, I wanna get some quick or responses from you looking forward. So in the next six to 12 months regarding your app, what, what are you building? What are you most excited about? 

[00:19:02] Stephane Godoy: It’s connecting intent before arrival. What we’re bringing right now on the app is once you’re close to a restaurant, to actually send that trigger to the operations restaurant so they know that someone is coming, which order will be who is the person that’s coming.

[00:19:21] Stephane Godoy: So also the cashiers know that because since this is going to be connected to loyalty. And have everything ready and personalized to that customer. It will allow us to reduce times in lines. It would a, a, allow us to actually give this benefit for a loyalty customer of their pickup area and everything, but through these triggers that will be able to connect the app to operational triggers.

[00:19:46] Stephane Godoy: Because the next big thing for us as KFC is not for customers, not on communications, on simplifying the operation that manages the products. 

[00:19:55] Brian Quinn: Last question. For those in our audience that might be building an app in the QSR space, what’s one piece of advice you’d give? 

[00:20:03] Stephane Godoy: Stop thinking in channels. Start thinking in relationships.

[00:20:07] Stephane Godoy: One of the best things you can do to start being digital first, an app first is seeing the app not as a delivery channel, not as a coupon wallet, not as a, as a sales. Growth channel. You have to see the app. As you’re face to face with the customer. 

[00:20:29] Brian Quinn: So we covered data, technology, AI, but at the end of the day, it’s about the relationship.

[00:20:34] Brian Quinn: It’s what keeps your customers. And with that, I really wanna thank you. This has been an awesome conversation. I’ve learned a ton. Hope it’s been educational and entertaining for our audience. But Stephane, thank you so much for being here today. 

[00:20:46] Stephane Godoy: Thank you for having me. 

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