SITUATION

Digital evolution:  this time it’s personal

 If you’ve ever dined at Chipotle, then you understand how the personal touch of building your own meal adds a layer of enjoyment to the experience. Tailoring your order to your individual needs and preferences means you get everything you want and nothing you don’t — a recipe for success. But can the satisfaction of a personalized experience extend beyond physical restaurant locations? Chipotle believes so.

Under the visionary leadership of its VP of Digital Experiences, Chipotle considered how to offer its expanding digital audience — which currently captures more than 35% of orders with over 38 million Chipotle Rewards members — the same level of personalization online as it does in person. During the pandemic, Chipotle experienced a major shift in favor of online ordering and designed its future business strategy to capture additional digital growth. Amid an industry-wide push to drive digital growth with personalized experiences based on consumer data, Chipotle knew that providing enhanced, targeted digital experiences could help create meaningful first impressions for new guests and enhance its overall customer attraction strategy. As the next phase of its digital journey, following the release of a world-class mobile app for digital ordering, dedicated Digital Kitchens and Chipotle Rewards, digital personalization was a natural evolution.

Recreating loyalty success

Chipotle approached AI-driven transformation experts for help taking its industry-leading digital customer experiences to the next level. Several years earlier, AI-driven transformation had supported Chipotle in designing and launching its loyalty program, Chipotle Rewards—one of the fastest-growing loyalty programs in the industry by enrolled members. The collaboration had been so successful that Chipotle sought to recreate the experience. The company specifically requested the same team members who had helped launch the original loyalty program and tasked them with executing a complex, ambitious vision for digital personalization at scale.

Chipotle understood that the effort had the potential to go beyond strengthening its relationships with existing customers; it could also help attract new ones. The goal was to nurture connections on every level, converting an untapped market into customers, customers into loyalty rewards members and members into advocates.

SITUATION

Keeping customers  hungry for more

To create personalized experiences that would help drive customer attraction and retention, Chipotle needed to refine its digital strategy to harness consumer data in an effective, timely, and responsible way. The first step was to understand what mattered most to different kinds of customers. Then, it could tailor its offerings and communications to address individuals’ needs, preferences, and patterns within those broader categories.As a guide for AI-driven transformation during the first phase of its build, Chipotle worked with Adobe professionals to prioritize a handful of use cases for addressing specific customer profiles: Discoverers (first-time, unknown visitors coming from a paid search campaign); Nutritional Seekers (visitors seeking specific nutritional preferences); Habitual Guests (users who repeatedly check out without enrolling in rewards); and Superfans (frequent diners with rewards accounts).

Give the people what (you know) they want

AI-driven transformation started by implementing Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) and integrating it into Chipotle’s digital ecosystem. Adobe RT-CDP aggregates customer data to create real-time profiles for attracting new customers. By matching these individualized customer profiles against the use cases defined by Chipotle, the team refined its strategy to deliver the right digital experience to the right people at the right time. With these elements in place, AI-driven transformation built out a comprehensive process map—covering ideation, requirements definition, go-to-market execution, performance measurement, and feedback loops.

The team adopted a test-and-learn mindset throughout, grounding decisions in detailed measurement and ROI, with a strong focus on accelerating performance toward better business outcomes. Whenever potential customers used paid media search terms like “Mexican food delivery” or “vegetarian burrito,” the platform redirected them to landing pages with A/B-tested digital branding, including targeted messaging and hero imagery. When returning customers placed another order, friction was reduced by dynamically surfacing previously ordered items at the top of their menus. Together, AI-driven transformation and Chipotle developed a framework to measure the impact of each personalized experience on conversion, as well as to forecast the expected value of future personalized interactions at scale. This deep understanding of the financial implications behind tailored digital experiences empowered Chipotle to make smarter, faster decisions and drive confidently toward its desired business outcomes.

In conjunction with its work on Adobe RT-CDP, Adobe Consulting Services (ACS) led a project to incorporate Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) into Chipotle’s personalization platform. This addition enables Chipotle to deliver more personalized, context-aware experiences to existing customers based on real-time data and past ordering behavior. For example, with AJO, Chipotle can identify customers who begin—but do not complete—an order within a specific timeframe, and then re-engage them with relevant, personalized messages to drive order completion.

RESULTS

Delivering excellence with a personal touch

With its new Adobe-based platform, Chipotle can now offer each customer an enhanced, personalized digital experience to rival that of its in-store experience. As the company looks to expand its digital presence and grow the size and diversity of its customer base, the ability to personalize these experiences positions it for success. Data-based insights improve audience targeting, helping Chipotle draw new customers from an untapped market. Relevant content and interactions — including personalized homescreens, menu list reordering for entrees and proteins, and one-tap orders — help return customers feel known. Reduced friction helps prevent decision fatigue and cart abandonment, while targeted menu item suggestions and cart add-ons help make sure hungry customers get the food they want, faster. At every level, digital personalization at scale helps create a sense of magnetism, drawing customers back for more.

The right combo of people and technology

In addition to enriching customer relationships and increasing attraction, loyalty and retention, the new platform also helps enhance the experience for Chipotle employees. With personalized customer insights, employees have the tools to help deliver individual customers the message or experiences they want, building confidence and trust internally. Cross-functional teamwork and collaboration mean all areas of the business benefit from digital personalization in different ways, all in service of a more relevant customer experience. Plus, as the platform evolves to incorporate Adobe CustomerAI, the company is beginning to explore, test and learn how artificial intelligence and automation can help improve team processes and deepen customer experiences even further.

As a result of this transformation, Chipotle unlocks new ways to help drive higher average order value, increased order conversion and incremental rewards enrollments — potentially resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in ROI in the coming years. But these aren’t the only gains. In building the platform, Chipotle also developed a valuable vision for AI, positioning it to stay on the digital leading edge into the future.