Leveraging AI and Data Insights to Deliver Fresh Digital Experiences at Wingstop

About Wingstop

Chicken wings are a staple menu item for numerous occasions, from family gatherings and sporting events to quiet evenings at home. When the craving for delicious tossed and sauced wings hits, Wingstop is ready to serve them up. 

Founded in 1994, Wingstop has consistently prioritized flavor by offering fresh chicken wings in a variety of rubs and sauces across more than 2,500 restaurants worldwide. It is among the fastest-growing brands in the restaurant industry. 

Wingstop's mission is simple: to serve the world flavor. 

Situation

Wingstop set a bold goal: 100% of orders through digital channels. To accomplish this, the restaurant chain needed its customer experience to be as fresh as the wings it serves daily. This meant modernizing its technology infrastructure to support seamless, hyper-personalized digital experiences and adopting a data-driven, AI-enabled approach to its operations. 

The biggest challenge? Turning data into power. Wingstop needed a more comprehensive view of its customers to drive loyalty, deliver highly targeted promotions, win back lapsed customers and predict demand. Data was also the key to unlock operational efficiency. It needed actionable insight to optimize both its staffing and menu, forecast demand, cut food waste and boost profitability.

Wingstop partnered with WWT to break down data silos and evolve its digital platforms. Together, we built the MyWingstop app, a best-in-class digital platform that delivers actionable data insights, enhances operations, exceeds customer expectations and increases profitability. Working together on this initiative, we doubled down on their vision to lead the industry and ensure that they remain a fan-favorite for years to come.

"Our partnership with WWT is great. We see on a daily basis their team members thinking like operators. They are often tasked with big challenges and finding solutions. We really appreciate the way the WWT team is not afraid to lock arms and take those challenges on every single day." 

- Kevin Fish, Wingstop Senior Vice President Digital

Solution

Wingstop needed a proprietary digital platform that could unify its data, enabling it to make informed decisions, optimize operations, enhance the overall CX and propel it towards its goal of 100 percent digital ordering. 

To achieve this, WWT provided:

• A consultative approach to digital strategy, planning and roadmap creation.
• Guidance on building cross-functional collaboration across various stakeholders to ensure alignment and manage expectations throughout the process.
• Customer journey mapping exercises to identify key customer touchpoints, needs and pain points.
• Hands-on engineering support in data engineering, data science, AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, e-commerce and identity management.
• Deep expertise of leading technologies and complex multi-vendor integrations in the retail and restaurant industry.
• A business intelligence platform with data visualization capabilities that deliver actionable insights, including alerting, KPI trend indicators, sales forecasting and recommended staffing levels.
• The implementation of a unified digital platform that combines Wingstop's commerce solutions, data analytics, machine learning and identity management for a complete customer view and scalable digital operations.

By the numbers

• Digital sales account for over 70 percent of all sales, up from 39 percent in 2019.
• The average digital basket size is 20 percent higher than that of in-store orders.
• 20+ percent growth in domestic same-store sales after launching its digital platform and dashboards.
• 10 percent increase in system-wide sales, totaling $1.4 billion. (Q3 2025)
• $2+ million domestic average unit volume (AUV), an increase of nearly $1 million over five years.
• Scaled from 2,000 to 3,000 restaurants in two years reflecting strong growth and high demand. (Q4 2025)

Outcomes and benefits

• Increased digital sales: By evolving its technology infrastructure, Wingstop gained velocity in achieving its goal of becoming a 100 percent digital commerce company and increasing customer engagement in online sales channels.
• Optimized menu strategy: Visibility and actionable insights into customer behavior and preferences allow Wingstop to tailor its menu offerings more effectively, reducing the cost of goods sold (COGS) and increasing profitability.
• Greater operational intelligence: Wingstop's business intelligence platform delivers AI-powered, real-time financial and operational insights, empowering executives to make data-driven decisions on key performance indicators, franchise performance and customer satisfaction metrics.
• Improved store performance: Implementing AI-powered labor insights and sales forecasting recommendations helps Wingstop's franchisees standardize their approach to staffing and inventory management, resulting in reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction at the restaurant level.
• Increased revenue and profitability: Through the development of customer 360 analytics, Wingstop can now identify trends in customer behavior, target lapsed customers and personalize marketing campaigns, leading to increased retention and loyalty, larger basket sizes, and ultimately higher revenue.

"We believe our loyalty program will be distinctive in the industry because we're not taking the typical transactional approach within our design. The level of insights we have with our guests today plays a big role in informing the executional elements of a loyalty program."

- Michael Skipworth, Wingstop CEO

Areas of expertise

Transformation isn't simply a technology decision. Such undertakings demand the right mix of technology, people and capabilities, which WWT brought to our partnership with Wingstop:

• Digital strategy and consulting
• Customer experience
• Retail vision
• Design, user testing, prototyping and software development
• Unified commerce
• Data science, data analytics, AI and machine learning
• Identity management
• Data strategy and engineering
• Cloud infrastructure

How we did it 

With more than 35 years of experience helping the world's largest companies and government entities, we've learned digital transformation and IT modernization thrive in the overlap of: 

Our deep domain expertise cuts across business and technology. We extensively test solutions and deploy them at scale which allows us to advise and execute to create new proven realities for our customers.

Here's how we did it for Wingstop: 

We savored every detail 

To create a successful strategy for Wingstop, we examined every facet of their business — from employee and customer experience to operations and technology. We identified digital friction points, key data sources and analytics needs. Then, we assessed their technology stack to find gaps in their existing point solutions and understand which systems were hindering progress. 

We built an AI-powered digital foundation 

We modernized Wingstop's technology infrastructure by building a best-in-class data platform that unifies e-commerce capabilities, data analytics, machine learning and identity management. This critical foundation allows Wingstop to own its digital destiny rather than relying on vendors' roadmaps, making it possible to design and develop scalable digital solutions at the speed of its business.

We served up actionable insights 

From store managers to executives, we empowered Wingstop employees to leverage data in their daily operations by serving up the right information at the right time. We created interactive and dynamic dashboards that allow employees to gain real-time insights, perform custom benchmarking and collaborate across the organization.

How can we help you? 

Building your own unified data platform can be challenging, especially given all the disjointed systems and technologies that must be incorporated across the entire business. 

We help organizations align stakeholders, conduct research, develop roadmaps and identify the right technology solutions faster. Then, we execute at scale so you can: 

• Drive digital revenue through point-of-sale transformation and unified commerce.
• Increase customer satisfaction through personalized experiences and loyalty programs.
• Grow to meet the needs of your business with flexible mobile applications and agile platform development.
• Prepare for what's next with AI-powered insights.