Turbo drive-through
Drive-through orders can account for up to 75 percent of restaurant sales, according to Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group in Franklin, Tenn. But ordering is a significant bottleneck. That's why Miami Management, which owns 16 Wendy's franchises in the U.S., is using voice-over-IP (VoIP) and call centre technology to speed ordering at drive-throughs at three stores. It plans to have its remaining stores online by June.
Brian Fields, director of operations at the Lexington, Kentucky, Wendy's franchisee, says an integrated point-of-sale (POS) system from Andover, Massachusetts-based Exit41 places two order stations in front of the drive-through lane. The system also uses broadband and VoIP technology to relay customer orders to a call centre run by Miami Management in Lexington. Completed orders are immediately relayed to the store's kitchen order screens and POS station.
From the order stations, traffic merges into a single lane where customers pay and pick up their orders. A digital camera associates an image of the customer and vehicle with each order so that customers are billed correctly and receive the right food. The system has increased peak lunch-hour traffic from 112 cars per hour to 137, says Fields.
The system also improves order accuracy because of the clarity of the VoIP connection and because the call centre staff focuses only on taking orders. Voids from incorrect orders have dropped by half. Fields says that the system will pay for itself in less than three years.
Next, Fields wants to let customers swipe a card at the order station and skip a stop at the payment window. That capability, says Exit41 CEO Joe Gagnon, could speed transactions in more ways than one. Since more than 50 percent of customers place the same order every time, Exit41's systems may soon associate the credit, debit or gift card with the customer's order history, present his regular order and ask him to simply confirm it.
Selling points
Call centre technology hasn't been limited to drive-throughs. Pizza Hut automates delivery orders with a service from Jacent Technologies in Santa Clara, California, that combines a hosted call centre with an option to use an automated attendant with natural-language speech-recognition capabilities. Orders are distributed to the appropriate store's kitchen and then to the POS system for payment. "We have plug-ins for different systems," says Trevor Stout, Jacent's CEO.
That's important because in many chains, franchisees use various POS systems, making technology initiatives more complex, says Buzek. "The next big trend is replacement of the POS and moving to more open systems," Stout says.
Self-serve kiosks, which have languished for years, may finally be ready to take off. Buzek says the average price of an order taken at kiosks is 20 percent to 25 percent higher, and the kiosk "always asks you if you want to upsize."
The latest IBM POS registers have displays that face the customer and enough processing power to drive full-motion video, says Jerry Leeman, worldwide segment manager for food service and hospitality at IBM. Unstaffed order stations can be configured as self-service kiosks, complete with swipe-card readers. These have been popular at a deli chain that's doing a pilot because customers can customize orders and ensure they're right, Leeman says.