Does your Restaurant App Suck Your Customers Think So

There is no doubt that year over year customer count declines within the restaurant sector are caused by many things including the ilk of slow service, cold food not cold, hot food not hot, delivery orders going out the front door as a customer’s waits, waits, and waits at a table for their food.  Ok, we could go on and on.

Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®, stated, “technology for online or inline ordering that is not as ‘good’ as McDonald’s is simply not good enough.”

Technomic recently found that “if you are experiencing declines in your customer satisfaction scores, you are not alone. Shifts in digital ordering behaviors and new customer acquisition may be to blame. But the general mood of the market is not helping matters. When you combine digital ordering behaviors with a general decline in national mood, we see satisfaction levels dipping and most often during online ordering occasions. The good news is that there are signs that a good in-person interaction can overcome that negative mood.   

Something is going on in the delivery market that is driving satisfaction levels down from 55% of consumers rating their experience as excellent in Q2 2020 during delivery orders to 49% today. One thing we know about consumers is that they tend not to be “wowed” by their first restaurant visit. More often their satisfaction with a restaurant goes up with experience. They come to know the brand first and then their satisfaction levels increase, as does their loyalty.

he best way to build this type of ongoing, reciprocal trust between a customer and a restaurant is in a face-to-face transaction. In fact, we tend to see higher levels of satisfaction on orders that originate with an employee than other order modes.  On average there is a 2 ppt advantage to an in-person order. It is very hard to build trust with a customer online.

At the start of the pandemic, I held hope this would finally be the event that brought communities together, allowed people to disagree with each other respectfully and helped build trust among diverse people. That hope lasted approximately one hour. That was the moment I opened an article about the delayed NBA season and found a festering pool of anger in the comments section. Displays of common decency were eventually drowned-out by this pool and other similar pools. But there were many common displays of decency and many efforts to make do.  

One area where those common displays of decency thrived was the support shown to restaurants. Our business was all hands on the Zoom deck. Trade groups formed, legislation was passed and when the doors were reopened customers were grateful, save for those occasional folks who wandered out of their anger pool to harass our staff. On average, the goodwill for this industry overshadowed the negativity. The result was unprecedented levels of satisfaction. In total, the proportion of consumers who had rated their last visit to the top restaurant chains in the industry as excellent was as high as it’s been in quite a few years. Restaurants were being given credit for trying. Some were excelling, even.

Since that time, however, we’ve seen a collective erosion of goodwill that is largely driven by this growing pessimism among online orders. Customer satisfaction levels have dropped from a peak in the third quarter of 2020 to this year’s third quarter. The drop-off was particularly large for Quick Service Restaurants.

At its most recent peak, 51.5% of visitors to the fast-food chain space rated their visit as “excellent”. That number was about as close as QSR has been too fast-casual levels of satisfaction in the history of our tracker. Satisfaction levels have dropped 4 percentage points to 47.4%. Fast-Casual restaurants did not see the immediate pandemic boost in satisfaction ratings but have also seen their scores drop as well.

Interestingly, we are seeing a different trend among casual dining restaurants where in-person orders have been recovering and satisfaction levels increased over last year. Midscale satisfaction is also up compared to 2019 levels but has started to come back to earth.

The question is, what is missing from our online ordering experiences that is not translating into satisfaction? This is a question we are setting out to answer in a new off-premise channel study we are launching. My hypothesis is that the missing element is the trust-building power of a smiling face and a warm greeting. If I’m right, then the question become how best to replicate that online. At the very least, we know that is not happening presently in our market.  It needs to be.” In short, the team at Foodservice Solutions® agrees with Technomic.

For international corporate presentations, regional chain presentations, educational forums, or keynotes contact: Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions.  His extensive experience as a multi-unit restaurant operator, consultant, brand / product positioning expert, and public speaking will leave success clues for all. For more information visit GrocerantGuru.com, FoodserviceSolutions.US or call 1-253-759-7869 

Is McDonald's Going Plastic-Free

Customer relevance is always top-of-mind at McDonald’s and customer touchpoints on hot button issues for all chain restaurants today according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®

Regular readers of this blog know that our Grocerant Guru® continues to tout that one of the hallmarks of the grocerant niche is the ‘halo’ of better-for-you.  Consumers are dynamic not static and McDonald’s understands that as a key player within the grocerant niche everything that they do to ‘get better’ add relevance for consumers.

So, McDonald’s is testing wooden spoons and edible condiment cups replace less eco-friendly options at "Better McDonald's" locations in Germany. McDonald's currently has more than 1,470 restaurants scattered throughout Germany, but for 10 days in June, customers at its location inside the Mall of Berlin had a completely different experience when they ordered a Hamburger Royal Käse or a Schokolinsen-Saurer Apfel McFlurry. If that taste as good as it sounded that would be enough for me but not McDonald’s.

So all of the test stores service burgers in packaging made from grass and they could've eaten that McFlurry with a small wooden spoon. From June 17 through June 26, the restaurant temporarily reinvented itself as the Better McDonald's Store — and, from a sustainability perspective, that wasn't just a clever name according to press reports.

So, the ‘Better McDonald's’ Store was completely plastic-free, which allowed the company to test out some alternatives to single-use plastics and to receive customer feedback on each of those items. In addition to paper straws, wooden cutlery, and grass-paper burger cartons, condiments and dipping sauces were served in edible waffle cups, and Chicken McNuggets were handed out in paper bags instead of cardboard cartons.

Diana Wicht, the Sustainability Department Head for McDonald's Germany, said in a statement said "Normally, McDonald's goes out with perfect solutions. This time we said, 'We don't have perfect solutions yet… please help us!'"

On note, earlier this year, McDonald's replaced the plastic straws in its U.K. locations with paper straws, and they weren't exactly well-received: more than 53,000 people have signed a petition asking McDonald's to bring back the plastic. (The campaign creator's reason for his big ask? "So I can drink my milkshake proper.")

Reports from Germany as far as Berlin's Better McDonald's went, the McTesters gave high marks to the grass-paper packaging and to the fully edible sauce cups, but they weren't sold on wooden cutlery, with almost half of those surveyed describing the taste of the spoon as 'woody.'  Cleary no pun intended.

Canadian versions of the Better McDonald's Store are being tested in Ontario and British Columbia, and Food & Wine has reached out to McDonald's to see if there are any plans for a similar concept in the United States.  How are you testing disruption? What’s in your supply chain pipeline? How many customer touchpoints would you have to change to drive incremental relevance?

Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a new menu product segment and brand and menu integration strategy.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/ or twitter.com/grocerant