There is not one factor more important to QSR operations than the guest. The guest is the primary ingredient to drive brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand popularity, and most importantly, revenue. And every step of the customer’s journey is crucial to success. Whether it is offering a plethora of payment options or fulfilling orders in a timely manner, QSR brands must ensure their customer experience strategies align and exceed customer expectations.
Customers today, especially at their local QSR, not only expect a rapid and accurate ordering experience but also want their meals fulfilled and handed to them in the same manner. As important as it is to offer the meals customers crave, it is equally as important to ensure the food customers order comes back to them hot, fresh, and accurate. This makes it a necessity for restaurant brands to implement the solutions needed to facilitate a streamlined and frictionless order fulfillment and management strategy.
But how exactly can QSR brands create these strategies?
From our latest webinar, “How Zaxby’s Unified Tech Approach is Creating a Rewarding Guest Experience & Company Growth”, Mike Nettles, Zaxby’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, recounts how Zaxby’s was able to create a friction-free ordering and order management strategy. Let’s dive into some of the fantastic insights Nettles provides on successful strategies to overcome these challenges.
Frictionless Order Fulfillment and Order Management Starts with POS Systems
When establishing a frictionless order fulfillment and management strategy, it was a necessity for Zaxby’s to leverage modern, cloud-based POS software to facilitate faster and more consistent speeds of service as well as improved order accuracy. According to Mike Nettles, they desperately needed their new POS system to ensure “the right orders are going to the right makeline at the right time.” To Zaxby’s and many other QSRs alike, it is crucial to operations that they can do just-in-time drops, just-in-time bin management, and can successfully hand over customer orders hot and fresh “so it has not been sitting underneath a heating lamp or anything like that.”
Zaxby’s decided to implement PAR Brink POS for its cloud-based POS software design, incredible APIs, and ability to ‘play nicely’ with third-party integrations, all of which help the brand chew through customer orders accurately. Additionally, they wanted to take advantage of “a richer, more uncoupled GUI environment so that [they] can improve [their] speed of service, ease of order entry, and multilingual capabilities”, said Nettles.
With the PAR partnership, Zaxby’s is provided bench strength as an enterprise-class player with published APIs and a third-party-approved integrator package. According to Nettles, these capabilities ensure that he does not “have to invent everything on [his] own”.
Brink POS has been the right remedy for Zaxby’s order fulfillment and management struggles and has proven to show “a lot of value out of the box for a brand that just has not embraced modernization until very recently.”
Partner with Expert and Experienced Technology Vendors
Another crucial aspect for Zaxby’s when creating a frictionless ordering and order management strategy was partnering with the right technology vendor. What they sought was a partner who had the expertise and experience to ensure a smooth transition to new systems as well as the ability to scale with the brand. And PAR has done just that for Zaxby’s by facilitating an incredibly simple transition to new POS systems. “The user interface and the user experience are very QSR-friendly,” said Nettles. “Hands down, one of the things that we really liked about PAR was you spoke QSR. PAR is no stranger to working at an enterprise level,” explained Nettles.
Throughout the years of trial and error, one of the biggest challenges Mike Nettles has experienced is finding a tech provider that will not outgrow the brand. “The biggest problem that I’ve run into as a technologist in this industry is outgrowing my tech provider,” said Nettles. “They can’t really scale for professional services, they can’t scale for training, and they certainly can’t scale for support.” However, PAR has exceeded Zaxby’s expectations and has positioned the brand for unlimited scalability well into the future.
With PAR, Zaxby’s is given full transparency and knows exactly who they are dealing with. “I’m dealing with somebody who’s innovative, I know PAR Brink’s heritage and I know where Brink came from,” said Nettles. “[PAR] has really put a nice wrapper of service and support around that to match the enterprise use case. And the fact that the technology just happened to again, kind of fit within that sweet spot of cloud engineering integrated out of the gate just made it all the better.”
Mike Nettles and Zaxby’s have paved an exceptional foundation for creating a bulletproof friction-free order fulfillment and management strategy. Restaurant brands must leverage ideal POS systems from expert and experienced tech vendors to facilitate these frictionless and streamlined strategies. And when brands, like Zaxby’s, find the perfect cloud-based POS software, like Brink POS, from exceptional tech vendors, they can enhance speeds of service, order accuracy, and customer experiences.
Interested in learning more about the solutions needed to create streamlined and frictionless order fulfillment and management? Visit us at partech.com or request a demo today!
