In November 2018, Australian restaurant chain Red Rooster launched an ambitious month-long campaign: If the company – which has over 300 restaurants – didn’t deliver food to customers in under 30 minutes they would give them a free roast chicken. That seems like it could potentially be quite a costly giveaway.
In the end however, the promotion was a big success—just not necessarily in the most obvious way. Sure, it led to new customers for Red Rooster’s online and mobile ordering platform. But the major result of the promotion was simple: Red Rooster delivered fast.
The restaurant teams focused so intently on speed in the kitchen that they set a company record during one week of the promotion, delivering in an average of 23 minutes across the entire system. This led to more welcome results: overall delivery times have remained low for months (recording an average in the low-20-minute range) and the customers that received quick service ordered more frequently.
“We could see that our people were so focused on delivering fast, fresh product and that obsession started in the kitchen. This led to great delivery times, customers trusting our delivery service and more repeated orders in the following months,” said Shannon Toms, Red Rooster’s national operations and delivery manager.
Red Rooster, which long relied on its drive-thru and in-restaurant business, didn’t even offer food delivery five years ago. The company first tested outsourced delivery, but when it attempted to build its own software, the need arose for a technology partner.
That’s when Red Rooster decided to join forces with GetSwift, allowing them to not only automatically dispatch, route and track but also receive detailed data in order to understand what was slowing down delivery at each restaurant—and ultimately fix it.
By the beginning of 2018 – after a short onboarding process – Red Rooster utilised daily reports on KPIs such as average delivery times and introduced technology like geofencing to automatically track driver activity. Since partnering with GetSwift, Red Rooster has reduced delivery times by over 35%.
November’s free-chicken promotion produced at least three major benefits for the Red Rooster business. First, there was a lasting impact ingrained upon employees. It was the “focus around the execution from the teams in restaurant,” Toms said.
Second, the whole experiment of focusing on speed had another major outcome: Toms and his team no longer had to focus on speed.
“We’ve gotten the system to such a good point that, yes, we monitor delivery speed but it’s a lot more hands-off and we can focus on other growth initiatives and how we can ‘wow’ our customers,” Toms said. “This includes marketing campaigns, new products, and the drive-thru business.”
Third, and perhaps most important, delivery provides rich data about customers that you can’t always get over the counter. For instance, GetSwift tracks when and how many times a customer has returned to Red Rooster.
“The power of delivery is that with all the data, we can actually prove the results,” adds Toms. “When you get five minutes faster, we do see more customers coming back more often.”
Interested in conquering the chaos of delivery? GetSwift can help you start improving your delivery operation in hours. Get in touch.
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024
