With 17 types of sauces and rubs, three cooking styles, and five order sizes, there are hundreds of ways to order wings and other dishes at Taco Mac, an Atlanta-based fast-casual restaurant chain. While an out-of-the-box white label experience served the restaurant’s earlier stages, Taco Mac, now with dozens of locations, turned to Happy Cog to create a customized online ordering experience using Olo’s API to support substantial growth in online sales.
Taco Mac
Custom Platform Fuels Online Order Growth for Taco Mac
THE CHALLENGE
Eliminate the limitations of a white-labeled ordering system
Menu design and functionality make or break a restaurant’s online ordering capabilities. Taco Mac had few options to showcase its menu in its own way using the standard Olo white label tools. It lacked customization in everything from brand coloring options to drop-down menu size — a particularly frustrating proposition for a restaurant eager to feature the full benefits of its unique menu.
Taco Mac also needed an online ordering system that spoke the language of its front-end customers while translating to what the back of house expected to see. The previous white label platform could not eliminate the gap between the best way to structure orders for the kitchen versus how the customer should see the options on the online menu.
Overall, Taco Mac had a lot of upside potential in re-thinking the online ordering experience.
THE SOLUTION
Develop a fully customized platform that keeps customers coming back
To create the most user-friendly experience, Taco Mac worked closely with the Happy Cog development and design teams to analyze historical ordering behavior patterns and identify bottlenecks and opportunities. Happy Cog A/B tested different approaches to sync online ordering with actual customer behaviors and create as many points for upselling as possible.
The goal was to build a system with the following capabilities:
- Less cart abandonment through a more frictionless user experience, including a mini shopping cart overlay that keeps the menu on screen as customers customize and add items, rather than requiring multiple page clicks.
- Higher average order value (AOV) with a system that encourages a higher item attachment rate through recommended add-ons.
- Improved location selection brought up to speed with industry standards by incorporating a map and more visuals for each location.
- Upgraded user experience (UX) that includes images of all menu items to increase consumer demand.
- More repeat visits enabled by the ability to create an account and “favorite” labeled orders by the individual diner.
Because of Happy Cog’s certified Olo partner status, all customization was possible through seamless integration with Olo’s APIs. This way, Taco Mac did not need to learn a new platform or take on the burden of additional interfaces. Taco Mac is still managing their menus, locations and product data on Olo.
As for the site’s look, Happy Cog used the Taco Mac brand kit to sync the site with its correct colors and iconography. To further boost user engagement, Happy Cog worked with a photographer on pictures of all menu items and location shots of each Taco Mac restaurant.
And as is typical at Happy Cog, designers worked hand-in-hand with developers as a unified group. The teams collaborated on everything — including visual QA and functionality testing — to ensure a seamless launch.
THE OUTCOME
Satisfied customer growth enhanced by data analytics
With the new ordering site up and running, Taco Mac saw an immediate change in customer interaction. Customer complaints and questions about the online ordering process quickly dropped as order values and reorders rose.
Empowered by the newly optimized site, Taco Mac continues to partner with Happy Cog for ongoing development services and analytics work. Because they can now access additional site data, Taco Mac can monitor user activity to take actions based on real-world use, which was more limited on the previous white label setup.
Taco Mac can now track:
- Average time on page and scroll depth to see its menu’s hot spots versus areas of less interest.
- Cart abandonment statistics that might reveal a removable friction point in the ordering process.
- A/B testing and conversion rate analysis for adding one item to a cart over another.
- Location monitoring that can segment orders to see menu popularity by geographical location.
With its now completely customized online ordering system poised to track growth-fueling diner data, Taco Mac has the platform it needs to capture a greater share of the critical growing online food sales marketplace. Equipped with a scalable customer interface that will grow alongside it, Taco Mac can continue to make revenue-improving refinements that turn casual diners into raving repeat visitors.