Subway + UserTesting

Subway needed to evaluate the effectiveness of personalization embedded in its digital ordering experience on its mobile app as well as the impact to loyalty while benchmarking competitor experiences. Importantly, Subway corporate needed to effectively pitch these insights and product changes to Subway franchise owners, who operate the majority of Subway stores throughout the world.

UserTesting enabled Subway to conduct video interviews with over 800 representative customers. These unmoderated tests were designed to uncover a large number of qualitative insights around the variances in customer expectations and the personalization requirements needed to build a winning digital ordering experience on mobile devices. This hybrid qual-quant approach gave Subway the necessary confidence to explain the ‘why behind the what’ for each feature and design decision. At the same time, Subway benchmarked competitors in their studies to triangulate feedback, which helped to ensure they achieved meaningful differentiation while adding unique value to Subway's mobile order customers in multiple geographies.

Subway used these humanized insights to more powerfully tell the story of customers who order with their mobile devices. The UserTesting video insights helped gain broad alignment and fast adoption from franchise owners with the new mobile app and loyalty program that was launched. Participating stores subsequently saw rapid improvements ranging from a 10x increase in loyalty program enrollments, to increased 4 and 5-star mobile app reviews, to markedly higher percentages of orders received from mobile devices. This remarkable performance has been attributed to their thoughtful research and compelling manner in which the insights were communicated with stakeholders.