In the fast-paced world of quick-service restaurants (QSRs), drive-thru lanes are the battlegrounds of efficiency. Customers expect not just quality and accuracy, but speed. Long wait times can deter customers, impacting sales and brand reputation. While specific numbers vary a lot from franchise to franchise, customer wait times are a key KPI for most restaurants. The one constant is that if an owner had the opportunity to wave a wand and speed up your drive thru by over 30%, they would do it.
One of the primary bottlenecks in drive-thru operations is the order-taking process. There are many ways that this process can get slowed down, but the following four are the most common, as per QuickByte’s interview with employees.
1. The employee responsible for taking orders is otherwise occupied.
2. The employee misunderstands the customer, requiring a re-entry
3. The customer is trying to speak in a language that is not their native tongue, slowing the ordering process.
4. The employee takes time to input the order into the point of sale. While this process is streamlined, it can sometimes take upward of 20 seconds.
The upside here is that a state-of-the-art AI powered voice assistant can deal with all of these issues, putting the speed of your drive-thru solely on your kitchen.
One nice thing about a computer is that it’s always available. No bathroom breaks, getting pulled away by an issue in the kitchen, no shift changes, and it definitely isn’t distracted on a cell phone. If the customer is ready to speak, QuickByte is ready to listen. Never again will your customers hear, “I’ll be with you in just one minute!”
Misunderstandings happen, and in the absolute best case, it gets caught before the order gets sent to the kitchen. As you may have learned from our piece on order accuracy, human employees get orders right on the first try less than 75% of the time. That means that you’re dealing with an incorrect order, or your customer sitting in line for twice as much time over 25% of the time.
While a native English speaker can order “A double cheeseburger and a large fry with a small coke” in less than 10 seconds, many of your customers are more comfortable communicating in another language. While this can be handled by hiring employees that can handle these other languages, this gets expensive quickly, as multilingual employees demand a premium. Customers can speak in any language they prefer to QuickByte, and it will be understood better than an employee trained to take orders in that language.
Finally, even the best employees can take some time to navigate the user interfaces of your point of sale. Even if they know exactly where to click to register a specific type of modification, it can take valuable seconds or even up to a minute to process large orders. With AI, by the time the order is confirmed by the customer, it is already entered into the point of sale, and ready for the kitchen.
While specific numbers and savings vary a lot from restaurant to restaurant, these changes add up to considerable time savings, which move your key performance indicators in the right direction. The average drive-thru interaction with QuickByte takes less than 10 seconds, almost all of which is the time it takes a customer to speak!
QuickByte gives you the magic wand to speed up your drive thru, and does it without any hassle or extra work for your team.
Your customers get a better experience, and it’s guaranteed to be cheaper than an employee.
Why wouldn’t you book a call with our team today to upgrade your store. Even if drive-thru has another issue that we haven’t touched on here, get in touch with our team, and you might be surprised how we fit in!
