A digital experience fit for a revived brand

With a history dating back to 1965, when its first location opened in New York, Americana-themed restaurant chain TGI Fridays has always striven to delight customers with its customer experience, as well as its food. Nearly 60 years later, and its UK business recognised that it needed to do a better job of engaging today’s digitally-savvy consumers, to drive both customer acquisition and visit frequency to its 86 locations. 

In April 2022, it hired a new CMO, ex-Dunnhumby and Body Shop executive Rhiannon Scarlett, to help revive the brand and lead its digital transformation. She quickly rebranded and relaunched the chain’s loyalty scheme, and needed support to ensure all aspects of the digital customer journey matched her vision.

TGI Fridays had ambitious timelines to relaunch its mobile-first website integrating the new branding and loyalty programme, as well as making the restaurant booking customer journey as simple as possible.  
 

Inviqa was engaged to redesign, replatform and relaunch TGI Fridays’ website, with a brief to bring the new branding to life, make it simpler for customers to use, and integrate the new Stripes Rewards loyalty scheme. Circa 90% of site visits are on mobile devices, so there was a real focus on delivering a mobile-optimised experience.

After a discovery phase, our Experience Design team conducted customer interviews to inform decisions on the new site’s design and customer journeys. This included interviews to gather the requirements of customers with additional accessibility requirements, including one with a sight impairment who uses a screen reader.

From there Inviqa redesigned the front-end, and replatformed the site to Drupal 10. Using the design system we created, we built components that provide flexibility for the team managing the site while ensuring new content is always on brand.

The first phase of the launch has included integrating a new menu system and simplifying the booking process. Phase two will fully embed the Stripes Rewards loyalty scheme within the site (previously only available via TGI Fridays’ app).