In a world of instant gratification and digital commerce, hospitality customers are demanding more convenience and personalisation from experiences in venues. Customers have higher expectations than ever, especially in quick-service restaurants. The cost of living crisis is resulting in customers expecting more value when purchasing, including the overall experience it provides.

The ideal: customers receive the highest quality experience when visiting a venue while being served quickly enough to fit their increasingly non-stop lifestyles.

However, with the ever-growing pressure of increasing restaurant turnover rates, many quick-service restaurants don’t have the resources to implement changes in their venue to enhance the experience they’re providing. Customers can then be faced with:

• Long queues and waiting times
• Order errors
• Limited customisation options

Allow us to explain how adopting a digital-first, agile approach to customer service can help quick-service restaurants overcome these challenges, creating the best possible experience.

The benefits of agility in QSR customer service

You know what a positive customer experience feels like. You visit a venue and are eager to go back again. You’re eating the best coffee or burger you’ve had in weeks, you’ve got in and out with time to spare.

But what’s an agile customer experience?

Agile customer experience is a venue’s ability to quickly adapt, responding to the needs of customers in line with developments in the market.

Here’s an example:

The season’s changing. Customers are starting to fancy slightly different drinks as the weather gets warmer. Alongside this, Pedro Pascal’s coffee order has gone viral on TikTok. There’s an opportunity here to tap into exactly what your customers are interested in.

So, you run a social campaign, with a promotion offering a limited edition iced coffee for May. This promotion is then mirrored on your venue’s self-service kiosks so it’s the first thing customers see when they walk in.
Your promotion reaps the rewards of the trends, and your data is finding more customers ordering this drink. You deliver training to the team, showing them how to make the best possible iced coffee they can. You can carefully manage stock so that you can keep on top of demand.

Instead of utilising traditional, rigid processes, an agile customer experience can operate with more flexibility, allowing a venue to innovate and seize growth opportunities.

How a digital-first approach enables agility in QSR customer service

There are three key ways that an agile, digital-led approach can boost customer experience in a quick-service restaurant.

1. Faster ordering process

When using a self-service ordering system, customers are empowered to buy. They can purchase exactly what they want when they want since they have the full menu in front of them. This makes it easier to make comparisons and purchase decisions, instead of waiting in the queue trying to decide what to try.

2. Real-time menu updates

Should you sell out of your daily special, you can take it off the menu instantly. Whether manually controlled or AI-powered menu optimisation, the software within self-service allows you to adapt to situations in real time, providing a much smoother experience.

3. Personalised recommendations

Agile customer experience results in a 3.6x increase in customer annual retention rates. As more visitors become repeat customers, a digital-first approach provides an opportunity to learn about their buying habits. When synced to a loyalty app, there is the ability to understand what the customer likes over time, giving you the opportunity to promote and recommend products.

Overcoming the challenges of adopting a digital-first approach

As a quick-service restaurant, if you’ve never utilised a digital-first approach to customer experience such as a self-service kiosk, it can feel daunting. There may be resistance from your team or customers.
Research shows that one of the major factors in the adoption of self-service ordering systems is ‘effort expectancy’. Effort expectancy is the ease of its use, especially concerning things like touchscreen displays, quick functionality, and access to information. End-users need to:

• know what is expected of them through the use of the system
• have a smooth and simple experience
• feel like using the system isn’t going to be more effort

All of this can be determined by the seamlessness of an omnichannel software approach. This means that the software being utilised combines key touch points throughout the customer journey, enabling it to feel like second nature for the user.

Allowing software to perform at its most optimised level, frees you to focus on things like providing staff training, and continually improving customer experience over time.

At Arch, we operate on a digital-first approach. We enhance agility with clients by starting small: improving, adapting and iterating constantly. We let your customers use the software, learn from this data, and use this as a springboard to implement a flexible process that can easily scale, with efficiency and profitability as our key KPIs.

We can bring our agile knowledge to help you scale your business in a way that’s right for you. Using our tried and tested framework, driven by a digital-first approach, we’ll craft a bespoke plan to fit your brand. Reach out to the team to book a demo.