Bojangles is Cooking Up Operational Efficiency and Customer Insights with Yext

For more than 47 years, Bojangles has been serving up the bold flavors of homestyle cooking across the Southeast. As the brand continues to grow, the need for digital transformation and brand evolution becomes more apparent. However, that's a difficult task for a scrappy team.

"Our digital team is small and mighty, " said Shayla Simmons, Senior Digital Manager at Bojangles. "We support all of the digital initiatives for the brand and manage our digital footprint across all consumer-facing content, as well as external communications."

That digital team has a lot on its plate. They manage more than 2K entities that include locations and more than 138k content and 600k listings updates per year. The company is also expanding into markets with over 130 restaurants in the pipeline in new markets like Texas, Nevada and California.

"It was challenging to manage all of our content as the brand continued to grow," explained Simmons.

For nearly 10 years, Yext has helped Bojangles stay ahead of the curve of their customers' appetites and the ever-evolving digital landscape. Yext's Digital Presence Platform serves as the brand's one-stop-shop for all things digital marketing.

In the current landscape, having accurate restaurant information is essential for customers looking to place orders, visit a restaurant, or learn more about the brand. Teaming up with Yext, Bojangles is putting a strong focus on this initiative to boost conversions, keep customers coming back, and ensure a smooth experience all around.

The partnership has helped Bojangles save on operational costs. The small and mighty digital team can manage Content across locations and markets, saving hours of work, even in the case of unforeseen events requiring immediate action, like understaffing or weather incidents.

"Yext makes workflow so much easier," stated Simmons. "Updates that could take me two or three hours, creating individual social posts or managing unique location information, are all streamlined with the Yext platform."

Yext also supports review management for Bojangles' growing franchise business. Collecting local reviews and enabling franchisees access to sentiment in their area has enabled enhanced localized store marketing. Yext Reviews helps Bojangles understand their customers better - including what they're searching for, how they're reacting to the company's products, and more - for continuous, insightful, and actionable outcomes.

With the help of the Yext platform, the team at Bojangles saves 58k hours per year through bulk content uploads and timely information updates to multiple digital endpoints. The ability to make an update in one place and have it automatically distributed to so many potential customers helps Bojangles digital marketing team be 9.0x more efficient than if they were to manually attempt managing all of this content. This has resulted in 9.2x ROI in 2023.

And, Yext is helping Bojangles answer its customers' questions. With more than half a million site searches per year, Bojangles' returns structured answers to 91% of queries on average. 95% of searches for menu items return structured answers directly from the Yext Platform, making it easy for customers to get legendary homestyle chicken on the table.

Beyond the ROI and hours saved, Bojangles, from the digital team up to leadership, is truly impressed by the strategic support they receive from the Yext team.

"Not only is the platform powerful, but the Yext team acts as an extension of our own," explained Simmons. "Having that strategic support from Yext to help us to take a deep dive into data collected on the platform and craft actionable insights to share with the rest of our team is incredibly valuable."

Continued Simmons: "Connecting with our Yext team doesn't just feel like I'm talking with a partner, it feels like I'm chatting with another teammate who genuinely cares about the growth and success of our brand and maximizing our revenue."