3 Benefits of Digital Assistant Ordering in QSR

In-person ordering is as old as the QSR industry itself. Whether inside or just at a counter or food truck, as consumers, we are familiar with this process dating back to 1921 with the first fast-food chain of White Castle in Wichita, Kansas. It took over 20 years for the next innovation of a drive-thru to be invented by Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield, Missouri and popularized by In-and-Out in 1948. 

So, voice ordering works. And yet, with all the technological advancements in web, mobile and telephony platforms, voice hasn’t been present. Instead, complex and time-consuming graphic user interfaces are dominant. And while there is a significant benefit to putting the ordering process in the hands of the customer, the tried and true method of voice ordering has been absent.

Until now.

The promise of an NLP model-enabled voice user interface within a web, mobile, telephony, kiosk and drive-thru endpoint is possible (specifically with Voicify). What’s better is you can build it once and leverage it across all these endpoints at once. The centrally managed and omni-channel deployed assistant further reduces management and deployment costs.

What’s better is the QSR customer has been training for this since the beginning of the industry itself.

Reduce order-building time

While placing an order for pick up or to go has been met with tremendous technical advancements like websites and mobile apps, the process can be tedious. A recent experiment with a well-known fast-food chain yielded a 90-second mobile app experience to assemble a breakfast order with mild customizations for two people. The same order was spoken to the assistant in the app and added to the order within 20 seconds. By bringing the order process time down by a factor of nearly 5 in this case (other tests have it as high as a factor of 20), the business benefits in several ways:

1. Less time to order placement means less time to change minds
2. Fewer clicks and swipes equal fewer opportunities for frustration and mistakes
3. Faster order assembly means more time to upsell 

Boost Sales of featured items and upsells 

The restaurant industry, and the QSR space more specifically, suffer from significant personnel turnover. This alone is a massive challenge to business owners around attrition costs. Under this critical business, the challenge is lost revenue related to upsell and cross-sell offerings. Coupled with the fact that many employees find it uncomfortable to offer an upsell or cross-sell to guests.

The beauty of digital assistants in order-taking is that they never go off message. Whether you need to offer a soda with every order or present a unique featured item within a specific time frame, the digital assistant follows the business rules you provide, never forgetting to perform the task.

This benefit alone could mean an uptick in revenue of note. If human personnel is only offering a cross-sell 50% of the time with 50% of those offered accepting, think of what it could mean to have it provided 100% of the time!?

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