Fast-food call centers becoming a trend
Jenn Abelson
Boston Globe
Nov. 6, 2006 01:24 PM
NASHUA, N.H. - When Jairo Moncada pulled up to the drive-through at Wendy's in Burbank, Calif., for his usual cheeseburger, fries, and soda, he knew things looked different. There was an extra lane.
But the 25-year-old could not see the biggest change: The woman taking his lunch order was sitting 3,000 miles away at a computer terminal in Nashua, and fielding calls from Wendy's customers at drive-throughs as far away as Florida and Washington, D.C.
"I had absolutely no idea I was talking to someone in New Hampshire," Moncada said in a phone interview later that day. "Our order was ready at the window. It was really quick."
It took a total of 66 seconds.
The Burbank store is one of several Wendy's restaurants around the country that have been testing the concept and franchisees plan to expand to at least 200 stores by next spring, because the initial tests are so promising. Other fast-food companies, including Burger King, Panda Express, and McDonald's, have also started routing drive-through calls to remote locations to get faster and more accurate orders and let in-store employees concentrate on making food, keeping the store clean, and ringing up sales.
The trend is transforming the fast-food industry in ways that are usually invisible to customers but can yield big results for the restaurants, which count on the drive-through business for about two-thirds of all sales. Every second counts in the race to deliver food faster, and no chain takes that challenge more seriously than Wendy's, which held the top spot as the industry's speediest server for seven straight years until Checkers took first place this year, according to "The Best in Drive-thru 2006" report released last month by QSR magazine. Checkers' average order was delivered in 125.5 seconds, measured from the time the customer reaches the speaker until the bag of food is passed through the window.
That time topped Wendy's by 9.6 seconds. But at the Wendy's stores that use call centers, drive-through transactions are expected to be completed in under 90 seconds.
"Everyone is looking at these call centers," said Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of food-services strategies at WD Partners in Columbus, Ohio. "You can move orders faster, increase the average check by selling them extras - Would you like fries with that?' - and improve order accuracy. It will become the norm in the next five to 10 years."
Typically, fast-food workers who handle drive-through calls are multitasking, wearing headsets to take orders while filling drinks or bagging food. It's a high-pressure job and employees often are more concerned about rushing through orders than trying to sell more food or being polite to customers.
Already, Wendy's says the call center is paying off. Drive-through sales jumped 12 percent at the six stores that installed multiple drive-through lanes that are connected to a call center, according to Kevin Fritton, executive vice president of 256 Operating Associates, which runs the call center and 14 Wendy's restaurants in New Hampshire and Vermont. The call-center employees, who earn about $8.50 an hour, are trained to urge customers to add items to their order and are timed on how long each call takes.
By moving the order-taking off-site, Wendy's cracked down on thefts that occurred during late-night shifts when some employees gave food to friends at the drive-through window and pocketed the cash without ringing up the orders. The new set-up separated order-takers from employees handing out food, Fritton said, and one restaurant experienced an 18 percent increase in late-night sales overnight after the new system was implemented. Two employees also quit the next day.
"It's the future of the industry," said Fritton, who speaks this week on the drive-through technology at the International Foodservice Technology Exposition in Long Beach, Calif. "I can't believe how stupid I was not to do this sooner."
Fritton was a huge skeptic just two years ago when he rejected a pitch from an Andover company, Exit41 Inc. to revamp the drive-through business by adding more lanes and installing a remote order center. He didn't want to move control outside the store and didn't understand why someone in another state could do a better job taking orders than employees inside the store.
"When I thought about call centers, I thought about how I'd wait for hours on hold with someone in Bangladesh trying to get computer help," Fritton said. "There's an urgency to our business."
But Fritton eventually agreed to fly to Colorado and sit for an hour in a rival's parking lot and see what the technology could do. He watched car after car zoom through a McDonald's drive-through at a rate he'd never seen - more than 125 cars during lunch hour. At the time, Fritton's stores were doing about 85 cars an hour during lunchtime.
"Using call centers allows us to provide a high level of service and be able to do that from a remote location in an environment where the crew can be much more comfortable," Don Thompson, president of McDonald's USA, said in a recent interview. "What it allows us to do is to use the same crew person who was taking orders to go out to be much more hospitable to guests."
For now, the Wendy's stores host their order center in a cramped house in Nashua where the franchisee group shares office space with the order-center employees. Eight computer terminals are jammed into about 200 square feet where employees take an average of 100 orders an hour during peak lunch time. Sheets of papers are thumbtacked to the walls with reminders to ask customers about add-ons to their orders that might increase sales, such as chili with cheese.
Customers addressing the speaker at the drive-through order area are connected directly to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The menu for that store pops on the screen along with the location and any special promotions for that restaurant. Call-center employees enter the request; it takes 40 milliseconds for the order to get transferred to a screen in the kitchen, where workers make the burgers, fries, and drinks. The cashier at the delivery window then views a screen that captures images of each car and links the order to the vehicle.
Of course, there are glitches. Sometimes, there aren't enough order-center employees to handle the calls so a recording is played to customers asking them to wait. Other times, the weather makes it hard to hear customers or knocks out power entirely, shutting down the system and forcing stores to take the orders themselves.
But when the system works, it works so well that managers at stores using the order centers refuse to get transferred to restaurants without them, Fritton said.
"When you're trying to take orders and make them at the same time, you tend to rush the customers. Here we keep a very relaxed and friendly environment and customers can take their time," said Kari Zeger, a 22-year-old from Nashua who works at the Wendy's order center and previously worked at Burger King and Dunkin' Donuts stores. "And not having to make sure our uniform is clean and not smelling like the food at the end of the day is definitely a plus."
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