Enabling O2O, online-to-offline, ordering for a QSR major

Executive Summary

Context

Onset of COVID-19 has dealt a body blow to the Food & Beverages sector. As the industry deals with uncertainty, customer behaviour turned 180 degrees on its head and rapidly evolving government mandates it is also trying to figure on how to convince customers and enable an environment wherein they feel safe in coming back to the restaurants again.

Even as the lion’s share of restaurant business has fell upon delivery a key challenge to regain customer’s trust with respect to on-premise dining remains minimization of contact between customers and store personnel throughout the purchase journey.

The situation entails conceptualizing the order journey from a scratch.

Problem Statement

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the brand’s business skewed heavily towards delivery. Although this allowed some breathing space but an over-reliance on delivery orders for survival meant negotiating with delivery aggregators who chip away from whatever remained of the overall margin. In such a scenario, it was imperative for the brand to revitalize its on-premises operations.

The brand came up with the requirement of instituting contactless QR code enabled ordering. Saras partnered with the brand in not just piloting the solution but also set up the necessary tracking and analytics infrastructure to support this novel mode of ordering as the solution is scaled across different markets/brands.

The Saras Approach

Deploying an approach inspired by ‘rapid prototyping’ Saras conceptualized an MVP user journey arrived through peer benchmarking and driven by existing functionalities available across the web assets.

By working in collaboration with Design and Engineering this journey was prepared and tested to be piloted. Parallelly, Saras was also interacting with different stakeholders within the client’s ecosystem to mobilize opinion in favor of this new journey and generate awareness among necessary stakeholders. More importantly the necessary analytics processes were set-up to keep an eye on the overall performance & arrest and resolve any major red flags.

The said journey was then implemented across a carefully identifies set of stores and monitored over a period of weeks. User feedback and inputs were gathered through questionnaires as a part of store visits to identify improvement opportunities and general receptiveness towards the solution.

A key aspect of the overall exercise was to make this new mode of ordering sustainable and evangelize the results across different stakeholders within the organization and generate traction for further improvement and enhancements that are meant to be taken as a part of the initiative.

Impact delivered

The introduction of this novel mode of ordering provided the brand to offset its reliance on delivery orders and revitalize the health in-store ordering. The solution also succeeded in gaining the trust of the customer’s that necessary steps are being undertaken to ensure their safety while also delivering on the food of their choice.

In addition to this, the new order mode was successful in increasing the pick-up orders by 5X and came to occupy an overall share of 15% of in-store sales.