White Paper
Are fast-casual, full-service, and quick-service restaurants creating the ideal dining experience?
Quality and consistency are key ingredients for maintaining brand health, making a strong impression on new and returning diners, and staying competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Consumers have plenty to choose from.
With restaurant traffic expected to remain stalled across the entire industry this year, now is the time to let the dining experience be your key differentiator. Maintaining product consistency, ensuring high food quality, and adhering to corporate guidelines at each and every location is no easy task.
It’s made all the more difficult when field teams are tethered to slow, manual processes and lack the ability to quickly and efficiently collect and share valuable data in real time.
Execution management software helps restaurant brands uncover the insights needed to optimize each location, identify opportunities for growth and improvement, and ensure they are creating the very best dining experience possible.
Consider these six benefits execution management software offers QSR, full-service, and fast-casual restaurants.
Without fast, efficient, consistent workflows in place, field teams will struggle to relay valuable, up-to-date information to key decision-makers. For many brands, process inefficiency is all-too common, resulting from disparate data-collection platforms and manual workflows.
Frontline employees often need to dedicate a portion of each day—or even one entire day each week—to compile notes and on-site photos, submit data, and disseminate updates with the relevant team members.
It’s not unusual for field representatives to take notes by hand, upload that information into a spreadsheet, and then email that document to an office-based administrator.
The end result is a slow, fractured system that prevents organizations from acquiring real-time field information and making dynamic, strategic decisions to improve restaurant quality.
Execution management software makes gathering data fast and easy, so field teams can more comprehensively audit food and service quality. They also have more time to visit restaurants in a single workday than ever before.
Consistency is a crucial component to the dining experience, especially in the fast-casual and QSR industry. From food quality and plating to signage and server interactions, every element of a restaurant visit should be uniform across locations. The devil is truly in the details.
However, verifying consistency across multiple restaurants is challenging—even more so for nationwide franchises. It requires routine quality checks, and many field teams simply lack the time to conduct more audits.
Image capturing tools allow in-store employees to document food quality and bring consistency issues to light. Field teams can also quickly file reports on food preparation processes, identifying gaps in those workflows and opportunities to revamp employee training procedures.
Those same image-capturing capabilities can be used to check for consistency throughout the entire dining experience. For instance, franchise representatives are able to snap photos of restaurant signage, document that it is being displayed correctly, and submit reports in real time.
Corporate standards detailing quality and service guidelines ensure that customers enjoy the best dining experience possible. Any deviation from those directives doesn’t just reflect poorly on the individual restaurant, but on the entire chain. All it takes is one bad experience to turn away a customer forever.
Field reps must check that corporate standards—from signage and product quality to restaurant cleanliness—are consistently met in this regard, and execution management software gives them the tool to do so.
The right solution supports fast, diligent quality control audits to determine if restaurant staff are adhering to franchise guidelines and representing the brand in the best light possible. Documentation is instantaneous, giving administrators up-to-the-second information on compliance efforts at a store level.
Customers who say they would stop patronizing a business after a single, poor transaction.
Nothing disparages a restaurant faster than health and safety issues. Even a single incident may leave a black mark on a brand’s reputation for years to come. Cleanliness issues like dirty food preparation areas, unwiped tabletops, and unpleasant odors are associated with low customer retention rates.
Many restaurants never recover from more serious health and safety shortfalls, especially if a location was shut down by health inspectors. Although such closures are often associated with independent restaurants, chains are not immune to these problems, even with their rigorous corporate guidelines.
Field teams are the first line of defense against a potential health issue, and each team member needs to be able to quickly and thoroughly confirm that in-store employees comply with restaurant health standards.
Execution management software helps check for health and safety compliance, and streamlines workflows so frontline employees can maximize productivity. With the right solution, field teams can easily document food preparation stations, check facility cleanliness, and review training procedures to ensure employees are doing their due diligence.
QSR and fast-casual restaurant chains have comprehensive internal support structures in place to provide employees with everything they need to do their jobs and create an enjoyable dining experience. That being said, things don’t always go according to plan, and corporate training procedures can overlook some important everyday tasks and workflows.
An improperly trained employee could lead to bigger problems down the road. If personnel has not been thoroughly briefed on food preparation, corporate standards, or restaurant processes, both product quality and the customer experience could suffer immensely.
Execution management software helps field teams determine where training gaps exist and flag deficiencies in real time. Furthermore, managers and administrators can leverage field data to identify corporate training procedures that need to be overhauled or amended to improve employee performance.
If something isn’t working, QSR and fast-casual franchises need to respond quickly and make necessary changes; however, without a consistent supply of real-time data, restaurant chains will be unable to respond to changing circumstances or make data-based decisions.
Execution management software provides a constant flow of real-time data for administrators to easily comb through and uncover valuable insights.
In some cases, field teams using our software have been able to cut on-site data collection time by 75%. In those same scenarios, administrators reduced the amount of time needed to aggregate and analyze field data by an astonishing 97%.
So, when testing out a new product in various markets, GoSpotCheck helps teams determine how that product is performing, how that performance varies from market to market, and if a broader rollout is recommended. What used to take weeks can be accomplished within days or even hours.
The larger a QSR or fast-casual restaurant chain grows, the more difficult it is to maintain standards of excellence, quality, and consistency. Corporate franchises need real-time updates from every single one of their stores to ensure standards are being upheld on a daily basis.
Execution management software provides a clear window into restaurant operations, giving franchises the information they need to optimize performance on a local, regional, and national level.
GoSpotCheck’s comprehensive reporting suite ensures field teams have everything they need to quickly and accurately document employee performance, verify that corporate standards and health guidelines are met, and share their findings directly to administrators.
Creating the perfect dining experience isn’t always easy, but GoSpotCheck provides everything your team needs to make it happen.
Schedule a live demo with a product expert to see how GoSpotCheck’s field execution management platform can transform your business.
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