QSR October 2022

DRIVE - THRU REPORT

family of five, it’s a far different experience to get your order in than wait until they’re finished so you can pull ahead. Amid COVID, Chick-fil-A refined the approach by fine tuning what’s basically a check-point systemwhere customers interact with employees at multiple points before pickup. It keeps users engaged and also enables Chick-fil-A to adjust based on individual orders, not just the queue. For instance, alerting one car to pull forward to a waiting spot while send ing another to the window. You’ll also see this with order takers walking alongside cars as they move up. In the QSR ® Drive-Thru Report survey, roughly a third ( 31 percent ) of consumers demonstrated a preference to plac ing orders with an employee in line. What that suggests is some still view using a speaker/pay window as a quicker option. To put it plainly, not everyone is doing it as effec tively as Chick-f il-A yet—there’s more to the model than placing employees outside. At one Central Florida Chick-fil-A, to share an example of the detail required, the location puts numbers on car win dows like tables in a dining room. One employee serves as a traffic controller, like you’d see at an airport (39 percent of respondents in the study said merging in a double drive

thru lane gave them stress) , and funnels cars from multiple lanes in. The window numbers allow employees—all con nected via devices—to know whose order pulls up by the car number and to not only react accordingly, but to offer them personalized service. There are also some Chick-f il-As where employees are outside the drive-thru window and physically bring the food over. “I think that’s another opportunity to connect with the customer, and so that’s what we wanted to do,” Abercrombie says. “We want to know our customers, we want to connect with them, we want to make sure that they’re not only get ting great food, accurate order, but that they feel cared for in the process, personally and connected with.” And it shows up in data, too. “Although technology and conf iguration are critical elements to offering a smooth drive-thru experience—noth ing trumps the service your employees deliver,” says Laura Livers, senior director of business development at Intouch Insight. “Year after year, the data shows that order accuracy is 15 percent higher when the service is rated as ‘Friendly,’ an increase of 1 percent over last year’s data.” “And not only does accuracy increase when employ

CHICK-FIL-A CONTINUES TO SET THE BAR FOR HOSPITALITY IN THE DRIVE-THRU LINE.

CHICK-FIL-A

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OCTOBER 2022 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com