A Leading QSR Brand could only identify 3% of their customers, and an entirely new category of customer insight was sitting completely out of reach.
That 3% represented customers reachable through loyalty program participation and digital ordering. The remaining 65% of transactions were paid by credit card with no way to connect them to any customer record. These weren’t customers who opted out of being known. They simply had no mechanism to be recognized at all.
Beyond the visibility gap, The brand had no centralized analytics environment. Data lived across disconnected tools and systems, with no unified foundation for reporting or activation. Their existing CDP (mParticle) was not delivering value, and there was no process for evaluating a replacement.
The business needed more than a data fix. It needed a connected infrastructure: a way to capture anonymous transaction behavior, a scalable analytics environment, a path to a modern customer engagement platform, and a framework for managing customer data going forward.
We ran four parallel workstreams over seven months, building the data infrastructure, analytics capability, customer engagement platform, and customer data framework that the brand needed to move forward.
We led project management and strategic guidance to pilot credit card tokenization across three corporate store locations. This pilot created the “Known Anonymous” segment, moving from 0% to approximately 65% of transactions capturable, and resulted in a full rollout across all 233 corporate stores.
Analytics was disparate, living across several disconnected tools and platforms. We developed their Snowflake environment from scratch, resulting in scalable data management and advanced reporting capabilities, inclusive of four query toolkits across their core data sources: OLO, Paytronix Offers, Paytronix Transactions, and Aloha POS.
We structured a mini-RFI for a Customer Engagement Platform to replace their CDP. Zeta Global was selected as the preferred CEM partner. From there, we supported onboarding and configuration including Snowflake attribute verification, data integrations, and key audience profiling to accelerate implementation.
We built a centralized customer data framework made up of a customized record matching protocol, a detailed data flow map, a data dictionary, a CDP shutdown workbook, and recommendations for an ongoing governance path.
“So far, everything is tracking for me. The clarifications you’ve provided definitely answered my questions and still enable the use cases we need.”
Senior Director, Martech & Loyalty, A Leading QSR Brand
The brand closed the engagement with a functioning analytics environment, a newly selected customer engagement platform, a governed customer data framework, and a tokenization capability that had never existed before.
The tokenization pilot proved the value of the initiative with SLT, resulting in a full enterprise rollout across all 233 corporate stores. The “Known Anonymous” customer segment, which was previously impossible to create, now accounts for approximately 65% of transactions. This does not replace the existing 3% of Known customers but unlocks an entirely new layer of behavioral insight that had been structurally out of reach.
Snowflake is now the single source of truth for analytics, with four query toolkits in place giving teams self-serve access to their core data sources. mParticle has been decommissioned. Zeta Global is onboarded as the new customer engagement platform, with key audiences already published and IP warming underway.
The internal team owns all of it. Every pipeline, workbook, protocol, and framework was documented and handed over, with no ongoing external dependency required to operate what was built.
What makes our approach different
The “Known Anonymous” customer segment did not exist before this engagement. It was not a matter of improving a number. It required building a net-new capability, earning SLT buy-in through a pilot, and executing a full enterprise rollout. We did all three.
Tokenization, analytics, CEM selection, and customer data management were run in parallel as a connected program, not a series of disconnected projects. Each workstream was designed to reinforce the others, and the result is a foundation where all the pieces actually fit together.
Every pipeline, protocol, and framework was documented and handed over with the internal team ready to operate independently. The engagement closed with the brand in full control, and no ongoing reliance on external support to sustain what was built.
Let’s talk about what a connected data foundation could unlock for your business.
