Case Study

Case Study hungerrush.com hungerrush.com providers, I was still giving away 15% or more on every order placed," says Tony. Recognizing that the rising cost of commissions was not sustainable, Tony quietly started building a third party exit strategy. "None of the third party platforms were helping us promote our restaurant," says Tony. "When an order came through, we didn't even receive the full name of the person placing it. All we would get would be the first name and last initial. It was a very one- sided, unfriendly process that we wanted to fix." First, he rebuilt the JB Alberto's website. Employing a group of students majoring in Information Technology at Northwestern University, Tony was able to build an inexpensive website while reaping innovative design ideas from a group of young entrepreneurs. "I figured that if I asked for help from the demographic that is most likely to order from our website, then I would have a better chance of getting it right by making the site intuitive and easy to use," according to Tony. Working with HungerRush's internal development team, Tony also designed a mobile app that emulated the design and functionality of the JB Alberto's website. "We studied how successful third party mobile apps worked and compiled the best features into ours including order configuration, colors, button placement and checkout process. We treated the online ordering app as a tool – it didn't have to be flashy. We wanted a good experience for the customer where they could get begin the ordering process easily and get through checkout very quickly." When it came time to launch, Tony had the benefit of a large database of clients that he had built over the years. "Early on, we made it mandatory to capture a customer's email address when taking an order. We confirmed orders by email, so our customers were happy to provide theirs to make sure each order had been placed correctly. This paid off as we had almost 85,000 email addresses stored in our HungerRush database along with 48,000 Facebook followers that we could use to promote our new website and mobile app." For marketing outreach, Tony narrowed the number down to about 35,000 key users that best fit the demographic of people who would order online. This was based on their distance from the restaurant, frequency of order, and type of food they typically selected. "At one time, we were using five third party providers, but eliminated them all in favor of the HungerRush RMS," says Tony Troiano, owner of JB Alberto's. "This helped im- mensely when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, as we were collecting our own customer data instead of giving it to third parties. We were able to communicate with our customers very quickly as we adjusted store hours, provided them with special offers, and encouraged them to order online."

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