The quick-serve industry's never-ending quest to erase the unpleasant image of disgruntled drive-thru customers screaming orders into a clown's face has seized onto new advances in technology.
The days of the one-window, one-lane drive-thru are long gone, replaced by touch-screen kiosks, call centers and something called Hyperactive Bob.
Each improvement targets the top two customer concerns — speed and accuracy.
"A lot of changes we've seen over the years have related to one or both of those things," said Bob Sandelman, president of foodservice research firm Sandelman & Associates. "Drive-thru customers account for approximately 40 percent of fast-food business nationwide so that's a good incentive for restaurants to do everything they can to improve the drive-thru experience."
Call centers and kiosks
One of the biggest changes to the drive-thru is the introduction of call centers. When customer place an order the voice coming out of the speaker is no longer an employee inside the store, but a call center representative sometimes more than 1,500 miles away.
McDonald's, which created its first drive-thru in 1975 in Sierra Vista, Ariz., Hardee's and Carl's Jr. tested the system last year.
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"In many cases you don't want to stop and open the bag and check to make sure you got the right order and appropriate condiments and napkins. It can be very disconcerting to the consumer if there is a problem with the order," he said "They either have to turn around and go back or be satisfied with what they got."
Another useful tool in improving order-accuracy is the touchscreen order kiosk.
Nextep Systems, an automated ordering solutions firm in Troy, Mich., recently unveiled a $7,000 outdoor kiosk that is being tested as a pilot program in the quick-serve industry. It allows customers to order and pay with their credit cards at the same time.
"There's a lot of advantages to touchscreen ordering compared to yelling into a clown's nose," said Tommy Woycik, Nextep president.
The kiosks are multilingual and provide customer recognition, remembering past orders once a credit or loyalty card is swiped.
What about Bob
In an effort to improve the quality of the food, Hyperactive Technologies in Pittsburgh invented Hyperactive Bob, a camera and software system that decides how much food should be cooked and when.
Cameras placed on the restaurant track the number of cars approaching or lined up in the drive-thru. It then feeds the data into a software program that estimates the exact amount of food needed in a three- to five-minute time frame.
"The production manager is a tough job because you're stuck back in the kitchen and you've got no idea how many customers you have up front, so it's hard to keep track of how many hamburger patties or chicken you need to cook right now," said Craig Coulter, Hyperactive's chief scientist. "If you overproduce the food it sits there and gets cold and your customers are unhappy. Or worse you have to throw it away. If you underproduce then you run out of food and that's the number one reason the drive through lane ends up being slow. Bob's job is to make sure the crew makes the right amount of food at the right time so it's hot and fresh when they order."
If a store cooks 1,500 hamburgers in a day, Coulter said the program allows it to determine to the second how long each burger sat before it went out to a customer.
Hyperactive Bob was introduced in 2004 and is being tested as a pilot program in several restaurants. Zaxby's in Atlanta is rolling it out in its entire chain.
Many of the changes that take place in the drive-thru are driven by franchise owners, said Sandelman. An individual store owner may try out a new technology then present the findings to the corporate parent.
Other advancements that have changed the drive-thru experience include headsets, credit-card machines, video screens that give a read-out of a customer's order and PDAs.
Drive-thru business has not only changed the technology of fast food but the food itself, said Sandelman.
"They're making items easier to eat on the go and that transport well like French toast sticks, breakfast burritos, things that are easy to eat and self contained," he said. "These are some of the things chains have done to appeal to and satisfy the drive-thru customer because they are such an important part of the business."
