A previous blog about AI order-taking in drive-thru explored the impact that it could have on labor.
That topic has since come up with multiple clients and even though the technology is great, the development and implementation cost of AI order-taking in drive-thrus is eroding profits, even in some well-funded concepts. As our company continues to examine industry trends, we keep coming back to another, more widely established form of technology that could have an even bigger impact on restaurants and labor. I am referring, of course, to our smartphones, which are really handheld computers.
To fully leverage the labor-saving potential of smartphones, though, restaurant chains and other foodservice operators will have to spend the time and money developing an ordering app with drive-thru as a pickup option, as well as certain restaurant design modifications to enhance the customer experience. Once this happens, though, the benefits of using such technology have the potential to be greater than AI ordering.
The adoption of mobile ordering, by both businesses and consumers, accelerated quickly thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. This technology, though, has struggled to enter the drive-thru space with the same force it did everywhere else. The primary reason was that the technology itself was not enough. Operators need to make some changes to their drive-thru designs to truly provide an operational impact and a better experience for the guests.
Most big restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Chick-fil-A and Chipotle have their own phone app where users can save their loyalty points and place orders. The initial adoption of this technology was highest among take-out orders since it was easiest for the chains to handle the delivery of the food to the customers.
Dine-in and drive-thru orders require staff to deliver the food either to the table or to the car, which is obvious, but each approach has its own design implication. With dine-in orders, for example, the operators need to call the guest back to a section of the counter or they must know where the guest’s seat location is to hand them their food.
Drive-thru orders create a few labor and design challenges. From a process standpoint, guests have to signal their arrival at the drive-thru space and then retrieve their order in the pickup area.
Let’s take a closer look at the design issues necessary for mobile drive-thru to become a significant part of the business for chain restaurants.
In general, the first implementations of mobile drive-thru technology were not very successful. Many implementations had the mobile drive-thru customer line up in the same queue as those guests who were ordering their meals via the traditional approach. After waiting in line, the mobile drive-thru customer would tell the staff they already placed an order. The mobile drive-thru customer would continue in the regular pickup lane. When a mobile drive-thru customer reached the pick-up area, the operator would have the order waiting.
This approach provides ease of implementation for the operator but offers very little benefit for the user since the mobile order and traditional drive-thru customers share the same queue. For that reason, the user adoption of this format was low, as history tells us that many guests would rather place a takeout order, get out of the car and go inside the store to retrieve their food from a shelve (shelf?) to avoid being stuck in the drive-thru lanes.
One key difference between the mobile order customer and the traditional drive-thru customer is that the former does not have to place their order upon arriving at the restaurant. The mobile order customer does not have to deal with payment since the transaction already happened in the app, so restaurants should be highly incentivized to have their guests transition to this transaction type if possible.
For mobile drive-thru to really blossom, the guest using this type of order must receive preferential treatment. It could include skipping part of the drive-thru line for ordering, pickup or both. While this approach sounds simple enough for it to work, the site needs to have the space to have double or triple lanes to dedicate one or more of these lanes to mobile drive-thru guests.
Among the various mobile drive-thru examples we have evaluated, user adoption more than doubled in locations with dedicated lanes versus those operations where the users had to join the regular drive-thru lanes. When properly designed and executed, and with enough time to re-train the guests, we’ve seen mobile drive-thru transactions account for more than half of all drive-thru transactions.
Here are a few key details necessary to execute mobile drive-thru technology at a high level:
Check-in the order: For mobile ordering to be successful, dedicated lanes or split lanes are necessary. Customers arriving via mobile orders just need to check in to tell the location that they have arrived and to signal that their order needs to be retrieved or prepared. This could happen on a speaker post, but it could also happen live with a team member outside or unassisted, checking with a QR or barcode at a check-in post. Visible and intuitive signage is important to separate mobile order pickup lanes from traditional ordering lanes, reducing confusion for customers.
Order pickup: Depending on the store production system, the recommendation will change. A concept that can assemble orders fast and has short production times, can have a combined pickup area. In this instance, the order is not pre-assembled but assembled upon check-in. When the mobile order customer checks in, the order goes into the same queue as regular orders, and it should be incorporated into the kitchen display system (KDS) flow, too. The pickup window, which has evolved for many high-volume concepts into a multi-car pickup area, is shared by all orders alike. Ideally, in these new drive-thru implementations, the operator can deliver orders out of sequence. And if a car receives its order before the car ahead of it, the customer has space to exit the pickup lane, making space for a new car to move forward. For concepts that do a lot of cooking to order and that the orders started to be worked on even before the car checks in, a separate pickup lane or parking spots become desirable, since the production timing will be much faster than a car that placed the order at the order post/order taker.
Order accuracy: With mobile ordering, customers customize orders more often and tend to have higher check averages. This in a traditional order could create errors, but given that the user is in total control of the order when they order on their mobile, communication errors will not occur.
Time efficiency: Mobile drive-thru orders increase the team members' efficiency significantly since the team members don’t have to take orders or process payments. So, from a labor point of view, mobile orders become more efficient than AI ordering since both order and payment happen before the guest arrives. From a drive-thru bottleneck and flow, they are also more efficient since the time that a car is stopped to place an order goes down from 35-50 seconds to a 6- to 10-second check-in time and the payment is eliminated.
Some industry examples of concepts embracing mobile guests have been in the news recently. For example, Chick-fil-A unveiled an off-premises-only prototype with an elevated kitchen twice as big as its normal units and two of the four drive-thru lanes dedicated to mobile or digital guests. And fast-casual stalwart Chipotle now has a Chipotlane in 80% of its new openings. Systemwide, Chipotle has reported having more than 800 locations with Chipotlanes. And if you are not familiar with a Chipotlane, it looks like your standard drive-thru but has one noticeable difference: only customers who order in advance via the chain’s app can use them. Chipotlanes would benefit from having guests check in prior to arriving at the pickup area to increase throughput.
Mobile drive-thru has tremendous potential and is already being realized by a few industry leaders, but it is very important to consider the concept specifics to thoughtfully adjust the design incorporating mobile ordering into drive-thru operations. With a fully functional app with the right blend of design changes and operational adjustments, a concept can deliver a more efficient, customer-friendly experience while keeping up with the digital age.
