Case Study: Qdoba Mexican Eats Leverages Yext to Bring Flavor 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 flavor combinations.

"Qdoba is known for flavor," 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 centralized 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."

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."

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