Inverse Paradox

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

My name is Patricia Meyers, I'm the director of marketing for Lehigh Valley Restaurant Group. We are a franchise of Red Robin restaurants covering eastern, northeastern, and central Pennsylvania.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Inverse Paradox?

It was primarily brand awareness. We work Red Robin Corporate, that owns 500-plus restaurants. But we wanted something that was more localized because we are locally owned and operated in Pennsylvania. We wanted our own website where we could control content and where our local guests could visit, as opposed to generalized information from a corporate site. Inverse Paradox created our website from scratch. And when we updated our website, we continued to use Inverse Paradox for minor improvments. The website also incorporated catering and online ordering.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with our account rep to create a plan to update our existing site, which wasn’t mobile friendly. We wanted to have something that had worked seamlessly on mobile and desktop, as opposed to the two separate websites that we originally had. And our parent company, Red Robin Corporate, had updated their website- so we wanted a similar look and feel, so that we're keeping in line with their brand standard. So we worked with Inverse Paradox to create that, and they pretty much kept us in the loop for every single portion of the development process; designing the wireframes, screenshots of what it would look like, creating the site, and then making it functional so that we could test it. And we went through a step by step with them before it went live. It is a Wordpress site.

What is the team dynamic?

I am unsure of the number of developers that worked on the project. Alicia was the project manager. And then there was Claire, who gave us updates that I would need or any functionality items that came up after using the website. When we were developing the website, we spoken often with Alicia in the beginning. But once it went live, we communicated more with Claire.

How did you come to work with Inverse Paradox?

Neil (Inverse Paradox Owner) used to work for our franchise back in the day. He used to work in one of our restaurants before he created Inverse Paradox. So that's how we have that connection with them.

How much have you invested with them?

They host our website. So we actually do a monthly fee which is pretty minimal. It's roughly $200 a year. And when we updated our website, it was cost $10,000 And anything additional that we do is on an hourly rate basis.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We've had positive numbers as far as pageviews and users go, which we're happy with. And since the incorporation of the catering and online ordering piece, we're pretty happy with how everything's working. We're pushing everyone to our website for those two items. I think a big portion of our user increase was due to the fact that we finally merged our two websites. Being able to have this localized site kind of gives us a nice feel of where we're going.

We are more mobile friendly, more eye-catching, which really helps to increase our pageviews. We can actually reach out to everyone that was looking on the phone because before it was very limited. And we know we still have some tweaks that we want to make, but right now we're just very happy with how everything’s working

How did Inverse Paradox perform from a project management standpoint?

Very well. They're very professional. They were honest and up front with us when we had ideas of what we wanted to do as far as the design. And they gave us their honest opinion of certain things that would work well and certain things where they thought might not. We appreciated how they were keeping us constantly ingrained in the process, so that we knew from start to finish, everything that was going on and approving everything.

What did you find most impressive about them?

For them, it's their ability to figure out any problem that we have,. For example, we have a company media kit that we use, and it's a print document, and we thought to try to take that print item and figure out how to make it something that you can read and look through on our site. So it wasn't an easy project because there's a lot of pictures, a lot of information involved in wanting to make sure that it was still easy to view, whether it was desktop or mobile. But they were able to figure that out and take that projects on.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No - Inverse Paradox is a great group to work with, and it shows in the fact that we've been partners with them for years.