"A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone" - The New York Times
"A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone"
Extract from The New York Times - July 18 2004
Pull off Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant -- or even in Missouri.
The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.
The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Y. Davis, has linked it and 3 other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center, which is run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven T. Bigari. And he did it for the same reasons that other business owners have embraced call centers: lower costs, greater speed and fewer mistakes.
Cheap, quick and reliable telecommunications lines let the order takers in Colorado Springs converse with customers in Missouri, take an electronic snapshot of them, display their order on a screen to make sure it is right, then forward the order and the photo to the restaurant kitchen. The photo is destroyed as soon as the order is completed, Mr. Bigari said. People picking up their burgers never know that their order traverses two states and bounces back before they can even start driving to the pickup window.
Once he found out about the service, Mr. Davis said, he didn't even need to think about signing up for it. He said he had dreamed of doing something like this for more than a decade. ''We could not wait to go with it,'' he said.
Mr. Bigari, who owns 12 McDonald's franchises and created the call center for his own restaurants, was happy to oblige -- for a small fee per transaction.
The McDonald's Corporation said it found the call center idea interesting enough to start a test with three stores near its headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., with different software than that used by Mr. Bigari. But the company added that it was more focused on other, continuing customer service improvements, like adding wireless Web access, or Wi-Fi, to restaurants, and introducing ways to let customers pay with credit and debit cards.
Still, franchisees of two other McDonald's restaurants, beyond Mr. Davis's, have outsourced their drive-through ordering to Mr. Bigari in Colorado Springs. (The other restaurants are in Brainerd, Minn., and Norwood, Mass.) Central to the system's success, Mr. Bigari said, is the way it pairs customers' photos with their orders; by increasing accuracy, the system cuts down on the number of complaints and therefore makes the service faster.
In the fast-food business, time is truly money: shaving even five seconds off the processing time of an order is significant. Mr. Bigari said he had cut order time in his dual-lane drive-throughs by slightly more than 30 seconds, to about 1 minute, 5 seconds, on average. That's less than half the average of 2 minutes, 36 seconds, for all McDonald's, and among the fastest of any franchise in the country, according to QSRweb.com, which tracks such things. His drive-throughs now handle 260 cars an hour, Mr. Bigari said, 30 more than they did before he started the call center.
''I don't know about technology" he said. ''I know about people who like to eat hamburgers.'' And he knows that people who like to eat hamburgers don't like the wait or the mistakes that often occur at drive-throughs, where many restaurants make well over half of their sales. One mishandled order can stall a line of cars, irritating customers and workers alike.
Mr. Bigari spent six years looking for a technology company that could meet his needs, including the ability to take digital snapshots of customers so employees could match them with their orders, reducing the potential for mistakes. He had almost given up when he met with a start-up company called Exit41 Inc., named for its highway exit in Andover, Mass. It sells point-of-sale software - the brains used to run computerized cash registers - to fast-food restaurants.
Working together, Mr. Bigari and software engineers from Exit41 put a small call center in the back of one of his restaurants in May 2003. Within a couple of weeks, the store was filling orders 30 percent faster and making fewer mistakes. Mr. Bigari quickly decided that he should set up an operation to handle other restaurants, and he now employs 53 people in the call center, which operates 24 hours a day.
Though his operators earn, on average, 40 cents an hour more than his line employees, he has cut his overall labor costs by a percentage point, even as drive-through sales have increased. He said the call center saved enough in six months to cover the cost of setting it up, in part because he no longer had to employ as many people on the overnight shift.
''This transforms my business,'' Mr. Bigari said. ''It's bigger than drive-through.''
By any of several measures, Mr. Bigari said, accuracy has improved at his restaurants. Tests conducted by outside companies found that his drive-throughs now make mistakes on fewer than 2 percent of all orders, down from about 4 percent before he started using the call centers, he said.
Mr. Bigari is so enthusiastic about the call-center idea that he has expanded it beyond the drive-through window at his seven restaurants that use the system. While he still offers counter service at those restaurants, most customers now order through the call center, using phones with credit card readers on tables in the seating area. Play areas at the restaurants have them, too, so a parent can place an order over the phone, pay with a credit card and have the food delivered.
The next step, Mr. Bigari said, is to use his call centers to take cellphone orders, something the futurist Paul Saffo said would become commonplace in the next two years. Mr. Bigari plans to test cellphone ordering this summer.