BJ's Restaurants & Brewhouse

How BJ’s Restaurants Modernized to Create Connected Experiences

Delivering a frictionless, customer-centric digital platform

In an increasingly competitive market, BJ’s Restaurants wanted to stand out from the crowd. Looking to provide customers with fresh, compelling, best-in-class user experiences and personalization at scale, Publicis Sapient partnered with BJ’s on a customer experience-led transformation journey.

The Imperative for Change

An outdated guest experience—delivered by a legacy application architecture—underpinned the need for modernization. Agility was suffering due to separate content systems for different channels, long launch times and a lack of control over search engine optimization (SEO). BJ’s saw the opportunity to increase loyalty through personalization.

Publicis Sapient was quickly selected as BJ’s vendor of choice and the vision was set: to enable real-time data-driven personalization, allowing BJ’s to optimize and personalize customer experiences in order to generate an incremental return on investment (ROI).

The Transformative Solution

Publicis Sapient began by determining the north star vision with User Experience (UX), Product and Engineering coming together to understand BJ’s full needs. This included redefining the guest experience and bringing in additional engineering capabilities to create an agile marketing function.

Through competitive analysis and data discovery, a “future state” guest experience was established, covering the journeys, architecture blueprint, platforms and technology capabilities needed to support the vision.

An in-house accelerator was built to deliver a headless, de-coupled, cloud-native architecture. Leveraging the accelerator allowed Publicis Sapient to speed up the foundational phase engineering by up to 20%. We also extended the architecture to enable real-time personalization and experience optimization.

The AWS services leveraged included networking services {Amazon VPC, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route53, NAT Gateway, Amazon API Gateway, Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB)}, compute services {Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis], storage services {Amazon S3, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR}, security services {AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Certificate Manager}, monitoring and logging services {Amazon CloudWatch, OpenSearch}. These services are utilized to efficiently manage and optimize the AWS environment while ensuring security and scalability.

The Impact

Stitching together data from a multitude of platforms, BJ’s team now have the tools to issue personalized guest communications in real-time, and new dynamic capabilities give the team visibility of guest location, date and time as well as previous purchase history. A single point of consumption of content and data across channels allows for synergies between business partners of different channels.

With the launch of the new platform, customer-first experiences, engagement and loyalty metrics have risen significantly. This has meant higher conversion rates, increased sales and repeat customer traffic, delivering incremental dollars through prime location sales and dine-in traffic.