Do you know whom you’re talking to when you place an order at a fast food drive-through? In most cases, it’s someone working in the restaurant, maybe even the same person who brings you the paper bag filled with fast food goodness. But, according to a 2006 article from The Boston Globe that I just recently stumbled upon, a growing number of these eateries are now relying on remote workforces to improve service accuracy and efficiency.
The technology is simple enough: when a customer pulls up to the drive-through speaker, he speaks not to a preoccupied employee standing a few feet away but, rather, to an attentive, dedicated call recipient sitting at a computer terminal in a remote location. Believe it or not, this saves time. Wendy’s expects to cut more a quarter of the time—from around two minutes to under 90 seconds—it takes for the customer to receive his food from the time he pulled up to the speaker. This makes a huge difference for restaurant’s that serve around 100 orders during a typical lunch hours. The secret seems to be specialization. Instead of having busy in-store employees take orders while preparing meals and restocking supplies, the dedicated call center employees focus only on interacting with the customer. The increased attention has led to higher sales, as the order-takers devote more time and attention to asking about extra items—supersizing at work. Sales at Wendy’s test locations have increased 12%.
In 2006, it was just the big companies—the brand-name fast food eateries included—that could afford the technologies needed to implement a remote workforce. But now, just like these restaurants, your business can benefit from Ifbyphone’s Virtual Call Center technology, an affordable way for any company to reap the benefits of increased efficiency and improved customer service.
