Sonic is the largest drive-in restaurant chain in America with over 3,600 locations. It created a mobile app to modernize the customer experience. The app has been very successful, with over 8.5 million active users generating a large portion of sales. Sonic is taking a platform approach to further innovate digitally. This involves developing a digital innovation platform to rapidly create new features across channels. Key platform innovations discussed include using business metrics for monitoring, implementing synthetic testing, and conducting chaos engineering experiments.

1. Drive-in Meets Digital
Modernizing a Classic Customer Experience
Allen Plummer - Sonic
John Gammon - Pivotal

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Agenda
■ Sonic Overview
■ App Overview
■ Platform Thinking
■ Platform Innovations

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Sonic Overview

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Sonic Drive-in
America’s largest drive-in chain
(it’s in the name)
Over 3600 restaurants in all 50
states
Focus on customer experience

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Fun Fact
In one year, SONIC sells enough Footlong Quarter Pound
Coneys to border the 48 contiguous United States

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In one year, SONIC gives away enough mints to reach the top of the
Empire State Building and back to the ground…
5,000 times
Fun Fact

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$200M Annual Marketing Campaign

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App Overview

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3600 stores 85000 stalls

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Outcomes
● Hit brand-wide system-sales percentage 6 months early
● Consistently in the top 10 apps in the “Food & Drink” category
● Customer loyalty:
○ “Power Customer” now spends ~65% more with OA per
year.
○ “Power Customer” now has more than doubled the store
visit frequency.
○ “Power Customer” now makes up ~ 43% of OA sales.
● For 2019 YTD, we were projecting 7.6M active users, but have
8.5M actual active users.

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Platform Thinking

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SONIC DIP Beginnings For All Sonic Digital Channels..
Who want a frictionless experience to rapidly
innovate..
The Digital Innovation Platform is a set of services
supporting a differentiated set of capabilities..
That drives change through rapid creation of new
customer features..
Unlike our channel specific approach, our
product allows the platform customers to
enhance their channels and test ideas in hours,
while supporting high reliability.

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SONIC DIP Beginnings

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SONIC Platform Value-Add

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Platform Innovations

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Platform
Innovations
● Business Focused KPIs
● Synthetic Testing
● Chaos Engineering

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Business Focused KPIs - WHY?
● Shows true end-user experience, rather than technical metrics alone.
● Understandable by Technologists as well as business stakeholders.
● Will show broad system-wide health across multiple technologies (messaging
infrastructure, databases, scale issues).
● Should be:
○ Alertable
○ Trendable over time
○ Relatively static

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Mobile Experience KPIs

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Business KPI Alerting - Not *Just* Metrics

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Business KPIs Radiated

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Synthetic Testing
● WHAT: Monitors infrastructure and apps by simulating a user-journey flow,
generally a happy path.
● HOW: A programmatic method by which regularly scheduled executions of this
test is captured, logged, tracked, and alerting against.
● WHY:
○ Proves out upgrades to infrastructure when normal traffic isn’t available.
○ Proves out application deployments don’t have adverse affects in
production environment.
○ Gives an early ‘canary’ on user experience holistically that can’t be seen on
a smaller scale.

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Synthetic Testing Pricing

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Wrestlers and Chaos
DDT – Random multi-AZ
RDS database: Restart with
Failover
Atomic Elbow Drop –
Destroys random Rabbit
node in HA cluster; rebuilt
ClothesLine – Destroys
REDIS server(s); rebuilt
Body Slam– Destroys
n-number of Diego Cells in
one AZ; rebuilt

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“Chaos Engineering” | “Resiliency Testing”
Internally: gam
ification!
Externally: Outcom
e Oriented

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Culture Shift

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Thank You!