How Nando's Built a Digital Ordering Platform to Stay Close to Customers

The Challenge

By expanding its reach with delivery aggregators, intensified by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Nando's was sacrificing its direct relationship with customers. The third-party suppliers that facilitated online ordering owned part or all of the customer journey.

The brand experience suffered. Customers couldn't earn Chilli Points or redeem loyalty rewards on some partner channels, and the process felt disjointed. Underneath it all sat a complex web of integrations with third-party systems that made any change time-intensive and expensive.

Our approach

A shared vision

Nando's product team set out to take direct control of the whole end-to-end experience, and enlisted Red Badger to help build the platform and the digital capabilities to maintain and scale it.

Red Badger ran a collaborative vision statement workshop with key stakeholders across marketing, operations, finance and technology to uncover core business objectives and drive alignment.

Swiftly deliver a simple and frictionless digital ordering service that customers and Nando's value and is designed to grow alongside our business. The platform vision statement, agreed by Nando's stakeholders

A second workshop carved out North Star metrics: the primary metric focused on increased orders across collection and delivery to represent market share, supported by measures of the customer journey such as depth of interaction with the app.

Lean, iterative delivery with empowered internal teams

At every stage, the joint team only designed and built what was required to validate assumptions and deliver value early, testing with customers and validating the technical approach with experiments as early as possible.

Red Badger consultants joined forces with the growing Nando's team to provide guidance, context and continuity, establishing ways of working in newly created squads from the outset and ensuring Nando's could own and evolve the platform independently.

A next-generation ordering platform

A seamless customer journey. All orders, whether delivery, click and collect or eat-in, are processed through one platform. Loyalty, discounts, offers and gift cards can be added across all channels without touching third-party suppliers.

Simple integration with providers. Clear integration points for logistics, POS, payments and infrastructure mean tools can be swapped in and out, and multiple providers can co-exist, including partners such as Deliveroo.

Microservices, owned where it matters. Nando's built and fully owns the services directly related to ordering and delivering food, while easily outsourcing and integrating supporting systems.

Cloud-enabled continuous delivery. A scalable, resilient cloud foundation lets the team make multiple changes safely, many times a day, with built-in testing and type safety preventing issues between systems.

A bespoke staff interface. A new tablet app helps restaurant teams manage incoming orders, throttle volume to protect kitchens, and turn off specific channels when required.

The results

The business benefits arrived quickly, months before the rollout was even complete. In the midst of the pandemic, with forced closures and socially distanced re-openings, Nando's could pivot at speed because it had built the core of the system: handling increased online and mobile orders and supporting ordering at the table.

The Nando's product team now has the know-how and embedded ways of working to optimise and evolve the platform without Red Badger's support, making them self-reliant and in control of their digital destiny.

With every customer touchpoint connected through a centralised system, Nando's has a constant 360 degree view of the customer, and can adjust its service offering at speed to deliver highly personalised experiences in a digital-first world.