Qdoba Leverages Yext to Bring Flavour to More Customers’ Lives

Qdoba Mexican Eats is a chain of fast casual restaurants in the United States and Canada serving Mexican-inspired cuisine. The company offers new creations, old classics and the opportunity for customers to create their own meals by exploring different flavour combinations.

"Qdoba is known for flavour," says Jill Adams, Vice President of Marketing. "We are a create-your-own concept. And we offer options from burritos, to bowls, to nachos."

The company, formerly known as Qdoba Mexican Grill, faced a challenge when it changed its name in 2015. "We went from Qdoba Mexican Grill to Qdoba Mexican Eats," explains Adams. "Because of that name change, we had a lot of duplicate listings. So when someone was searching for Qdoba, they might not always get the most accurate response."

"It needs to be easy for customers to find our locations when they're driving around or looking on their phone," explains Margaux Reese, Digital Experience Manager. "People searching for restaurants will often look by type of cuisine — so 'Mexican restaurant,' or 'Mexican food' — and also by food item — like 'burrito,' 'nachos,' or 'tacos.' And consumers are becoming more and more specific with their queries, searching for things like gluten-free options. For example, I'm vegetarian. So when I look for restaurants, I always add this to my query. It's also important to provide a higher level of detail about our offerings — whether a location is open late nights, for example, or if we offer delivery. It's really about providing those details of what we have to offer and making sure it matches directly to what the customer is looking for."

Qdoba teamed up with Yext to tackle this massive data cleansing challenge, and in its first launch, updated more than 42k location names, 35k addresses and 24k phone numbers during the course of the digital rebrand. Qdoba then started using Yext for Food to increase its discoverability among customers searching for specific foods.

68% of food searches occur without a specific restaurant name in mind, so it's important that restaurants like Qdoba rank for unbranded search terms like specific menu items. "We're a Mexican restaurant chain, but we also provide gluten-free options and vegetarian options," says Reese.

The team needed a tool that would make it easy to update information for individual locations, including menu items, and maintain all of the brand information about Qdoba from a single centralised dashboard. "We've used Yext to publish our menu within Google," adds Reese. "This has helped us rank not only for certain keywords — which has been a major goal for us — but also provides users with the instant responses they are looking for. Customers want to know what a particular restaurant location has to offer. Now with Yext, we can provide them brand-verified answers to their questions right away."

Wilkesは在校生と教職員向けに176件のFAQを立ち上げ、80の教育プログラムをCMSに追加して、Yextのサイト検索体験に役立てています。Wilkesのチームがこうした教育プログラムを読み込むのに要した期間はわずか20日で、FAQがクリティカルマスに達するまでの期間は25日でした（Yextのキックオフ時から）。

Yext導入からわずか2か月（2020年8月～2020年9月）で、Wilkes Universityのサイト検索結果のクリックスルー率は54%に達しました。

次の優先事項は、在学生と教職員が重要な日程や学業カレンダーにアクセスできるようにするため、検索でイベントを表示することでした。WilkesとYextのチームは、年間計画を立てようとしている学生や教職員により良いサービスを提供できるよう、「学業カレンダー」という用語の検索が急増するタイミングを注意深く監視しています。

Wilkesは、2020年の入学志願者のプロセスはまったく異なるものになることを早い段階から認識しており、こうした学生が実際に現地訪問することなくキャンパスを「訪問」できるようにするバーチャルツアーを開始しました。Yextは、費用や時間のかかるウェブサイトの徹底的な見直しを行わず、このバーチャルツアーへのトラフィックを促進するのに役立ちました。「新型コロナウイルス感染症」と「バーチャルツアー」を含む質問はWilkesのサイト検索エクスペリエンスで最も一般的な検索の1つであり、わずか数か月（2020年8月～2020年12月）の間に数百件の検索が発生しました。

また、少し頻度は下がりますが、「Wilkesの学費はいくらですか」など、「授業料」に関する質問も同様に多数寄せられます。この質問は、大学入学プロセスにおいて不可欠なステップであるだけでなく、入学カウンセラーが回答に多くの時間を費やす質問でもあります。Wilkesは、サイト検索体験を使ってこれらの質問の95%にナレッジ・カード形式で回答することに成功。これは、Googleがクエリに対して直接的な回答を返すのと同じ方法です。

When implementing Qdoba's menus and catering pages with Yext, more than 166k website links across the web were updated. According to Qdoba, over the course of a single month, Yext-powered listings and local pages drove more than 16k orders via Qdoba's online menus, resulting in a return on its Yext investment of 14.45X, as of October 2017.

"We saw the value with Yext very fast," says Reese. "Our listings were not previously being managed — so in just cleaning up our listings, we saw a spike in traffic and a reduction in phone calls to our restaurants from customers to understand things like 'what are the store hours?' And then building on that success by increasing our discoverability for the specific menu items we serve has been a game-changer for us."

Adams values Yext's close collaboration with Qdoba. "The partnership has been really amazing," she says. "With Yext, we feel like we do have a true partner."