AI Powered Custom Data Analytics Platform for Restaurants

Company Overview

Distil is a powerful platform built for businesses and online retailers, enabling them to turn scattered customer data from multiple channels into a single, unified customer view. By combining data aggregation with AI-driven insights, Distil helps brands understand buyer behavior, segment audiences, and run smarter campaigns all without needing large technical teams.

Using OpenTable and other integrations, Distil acts like an intelligent data team that organizes customer information and surfaces clear, actionable intelligence for personalized marketing and better customer experiences.

Today, Distil empowers brands to access clear, actionable customer intelligence powered by a scalable, AI-ready foundation built for growth.

Business Challenges

• Fragmented Customer Data - businesses faced difficulties creating a complete customer profile because data from purchases, browsing, and engagement was spread across disconnected systems, leading to incomplete insights.

• Limited Targeting & Personalization - without unified customer profiles, companies struggled to segment audiences effectively or deliver tailored offers that drive conversions.

• Resource Constraints - small to mid-sized businesses often lacked the in-house technical expertise or resources to clean, analyze, and utilize their growing customer data effectively.

• Outdated System Architecture - the legacy codebase and monolithic structure made the platform difficult to scale, slow to adapt to new requirements, and prone to performance issues as customer data volumes grew.

Scope

StrategistHub partnered with Distil to modernize its existing customer data platform by revamping the system architecture, enhancing UI/UX, and implementing automated testing. The goal was not to reinvent the platform but to rebuild it for scalability, speed, and intelligence using a modern tech stack.

Key focus areas included:

• Rewriting the legacy frontend and backend codebase with TypeScript, React, and scalable architecture patterns.

• Enhancing user experience through interface optimizations and performance tuning.

• Embedding end-to-end automated testing (unit, integration, E2E) to ensure platform reliability.

• Documenting all business logic to enable future development and easier onboarding of new developers.

• Enabling the platform to support advanced AI features like identity resolution and predictive segmentation without disrupting current user workflows.

What We Delivered

• Business Logic Understanding & Documentation - we began by deeply analyzing the legacy system to identify, capture, and document all core business rules, workflows, and data interactions. This ensured a seamless knowledge transfer, preserved existing logic, and laid a reliable foundation for modernization efforts.

• Complete Platform Modernization - we modernized Distil's legacy system by overhauling its architecture, boosting performance, and introducing scalable, modular structures to enable seamless integration, faster development, and long-term maintainability.

• Scalable Architecture with Enhanced User Experience - we restructured Distil's platform with a modular, scalable architecture that not only enables seamless feature expansion but also elevates the user experience. By improving UI consistency, responsiveness, and load performance, we delivered a clean, intuitive interface that supports higher engagement and future growth.

• AI-Ready Data Infrastructure - optimized data flows and prepared the system for AI use cases by creating structured pipelines for customer data ingestion, transformation, and segmentation, enabling features like identity resolution and behavioral prediction.

• Automated Testing at Every Layer - integrated robust unit, integration, and end-to-end (E2E) testing to ensure the platform remains reliable and bug-free during future releases. This also reduced regression issues and boosted release confidence.

• Customer Segmentation Dashboard - implemented a dynamic dashboard using Nivo line charts to visualize real-time segmentation based on behavior, purchase trends, and demographics, empowering data-driven marketing decisions.

• Seamless Integration Compatibility - maintained compatibility with existing integrations like Shopify, Klaviyo, and Dotdigital, ensuring no disruption for current clients while setting the foundation for new connectors.

Impact

• Scalable Architecture & Modern Stack - the platform now runs on a robust, scalable foundation, enabling Distil to handle future growth with confidence and reduced technical complexity.

• Enhanced User Experience - a redesigned interface and streamlined workflows resulted in improved usability, faster load times, and increased customer satisfaction across all devices.

• Reliable, Test-Driven Development - end-to-end automated testing across unit, integration, and system levels ensured higher platform stability, fewer regressions, and faster release cycles.

Approach

• Collaborative Discovery - our team embedded directly with Distil's product and data teams to deeply understand their goals, user pain points, and existing architecture. Together, we mapped out the data flows, identified system bottlenecks, and prioritized features that would deliver the fastest impact.

• Agile, Incremental Delivery - we adopted an iterative delivery model with two-week sprints, enabling us to rapidly prototype, validate, and refine solutions alongside Distil's stakeholders. Regular demos and feedback sessions ensured alignment and minimized risk.

• Engineering Alignment & Best Practices - StrategistHub's engineers worked within Distil's existing repositories and workflows, following their code standards, CI/CD pipelines, and review processes. This seamless collaboration not only accelerated delivery but also upskilled internal teams on advanced AI and modern front-end practices.

• Focus on AI-Driven Outcomes - from identity resolution to predictive buyer insights, we designed each solution with machine learning and actionable data in mind, ensuring Distil could deliver a truly intelligent CDP experience to its clients.