Using software to coach employees for better fast food customer service

Every successful QSR is more than just the food it serves. In order to win the loyalty of your customers, you need to get to know them – who they are, what they want, and how they like to be treated. This is true for every QSR, regardless of what's on the menu.

Luckily, you may already have the tools you need to better understand what your customers expect. Once you have a good picture of your customers, you can use those findings to improve operations and build a customer service plan. Here's how you can use software to coach your employees for better customer service.

Identify customer trends

Reporting and analytics tools like Delaget combine many different data streams to give you a consolidated view of your business. You can toggle through different views to dig into sales, labor, sales channels, customer surveys, and more. All that data allows you to understand the impact of your limited-time offers, menu changes, and beyond. Delaget also comes with speed of service tools, so you can keep track of transactions by day part.

Understanding sales and speed of service, as well as how they interact with each other, is helpful in making sure you have the right people scheduled at the right times. Third-party customer service feedback can also be compared to speed of service reports and employee schedules, so you can identify and correct customer service issues at the source.

And there's more: the right analytics tools can track things like whether your customers prefer kiosks, or if your delivery partnership is costing you more than it's worth. You can see if a mobile app could improve your sales, or identify that the mobile app you already have is actually having a negative impact on the customer experience. (Yes, this has happened.)

Leverage those findings to make better decisions

Once you have the data, it's important to act on it. For example, if your product mix report is telling you that you sell 80% of your breadsticks after 6 pm, don't have your employees prep 50 orders of breadsticks when the store opens at 10 am – have them prepped during the pre-dinner lull. If your sales report is telling you that sales improve 14% whenever Jeremy A. is working, then find out what Jeremy A. is doing that everyone else isn't.

Bringing multiple data streams together to generate insights is one of the most important features of reporting and analytics software, so make sure you're using the tools available to you.

The golden rule

Treat people the way they want to be treated. You've heard it a thousand times before (but maybe not in the context of QSR ownership). It's easy to pull up reports that your software generates for you, and it's easy to glance over them for any urgent action items that jump out at you. But to really get the most out of your tools, you should be actively looking for ways to improve the customer experience.

Get down deep into your reports. Better yet, have your above-store leaders do some of the digging – then have them leverage what they learn by going store-to-store and coaching employees on improving customer service.

Let your own data be your guide

If you're using QSR management software like Delaget, you already have the data you need to make a change right at your fingertips. Bringing multiple data streams together with tools, like Delaget Coach, can help connect data points that would otherwise go unnoticed. Use that data to learn more about your customers and how they want to be treated. You'll be happy with the results.