Planning for and Securing Success for Jersey Mike's Most Generous Day of the Year

Situation

The objective was to use best-in-class architecture, monitoring and support strategies to help Jersey Mike's e-commerce channels avoid significant downtime and performance issues that could impact the customer experience and risk the success of Jersey Mike's busiest and most important day, Day of Giving, in which the stores give 100% of sales back to local community charities.

Slow connections, app crashes and network issues are known issues that impact customer experience, but these issues were exacerbated when COVID-19 became a household name. Since 2020, mobile app orders and curbside pick-up have skyrocketed. With Day of Giving and the promotion surrounding it, we were tasked with preparing an app for optimal performance, and planning for 5x the average load.

Solution: Scaling software platform and load testing

Knowing the significance for our client's annual Day of Giving, e-commerce channel stability, improved responsiveness and overall platform performance were mandatory for the success of the event. The biggest priority was providing a seamless customer experience and re-engineering the Jersey Mike's (JM) platform to a new scalable AWS-based Kubernetes platform ahead of the event was the key.

Once the platform was designed, developed and migration was complete, ongoing load testing was performed before the Day of Giving. Together, WWT Digital and Jersey Mike's set the goal to support up to 5x of the previous highest sales day transactions. To ensure success, resources were scaled up and practice fire drills were completed with cross-functional WWT and Jersey Mike's teams.

The optimal configuration of application resources was identified to ensure confidence in the system to handle a high traffic day and keep costs down. After writing and running load tests against a production-like test environment, the results were used to identify bottlenecks in the system, as well as areas that were over-provisioned and could be further optimized to reduce unnecessary costs.  

While the load tests were running, the WWT Digital and Jersey Mike's teams configured and assessed the dashboard, ran queries against the log search engine and performed other debugging techniques. This provided confidence that the monitoring system would perform adequately and helped strengthen team real-time triaging and application debugging. 

Collaborative documentation was created for WWT and Jersey Mike's dev team access, outlining potential threats and outcomes that should be followed to avoid customer disruption and a negative business impact as much as possible. Once the team felt confident in the state of preparedness and the Day of Giving arrived, WWT Digital instituted a live war room support system which included the ongoing monitoring of sales and giving activity, technical load, stability and security metrics, in conjunction with Jersey Mike's, for ongoing support requested from the opening of the first stores on the East coast until the final stores in Hawaii closed later that same day. 

This collaborative client-partner team evaluated the progress in retro analysis and making notes of the positive outcomes and additional performance, security and support tactics to consider as the scale and shape of digital commerce continues to grow and change year over year.

Outcomes and benefits

Jersey Mike's had record-breaking sales on March 31, 2021 — more than doubling their goal — and all the sales (not just profits) were donated to charity. Jersey Mike's digital commerce channels saw a radical uptick in app installation, orders and loyalty profiles created over the daily baseline metrics.  The app and underlying platform handled the extra activity securely and with zero disruptions.

While the success of the day itself was a huge in-the-moment win, knowing that the company can scale to engage and delight up to 5x the average volume of customers is a lasting accomplishment. This quick-serve restaurant (QSR) and its franchisees are proud of their Day of Giving and the digital customer experience we created together. Many brands can work to increase customer awareness, but working together, we ensured Jersey Mike's commerce platforms and technology infrastructure could handle the opportunity. In June of 2022, the mobile app World Wide Technology developed for Jersey Mike's was awarded "Best Mobile Interactive Customer Experience (Mobile ICX)." 

This case study originally published in May 2021 and was updated January 2024. Since Month of Giving began in 2011, Jersey Mike's has raised over $88 million for local charities.