4 Reasons Why Your Restaurant Should Use Off-Premise Restaurant Support

In the push to grow market share, many quick service and fast casual restaurant companies are turning to off-premise restaurant support to boost margins and improve their customer experience. Off-premise restaurant support – essentially off site contact centers specializing in handling drive thru, call-in orders, catering fulfillment, and even scheduling reservations – delivers benefits to every transaction.

Customers receive better, faster service in a controlled environment that reduces noise and confusion, and ensures no customer ever has to wait on hold. So the busy sandwich maker doesn’t have to hold the phone in the crook of his or her shoulder while struggling to hear over the din of the dining room. The sports fans craving wings and burgers before the big game don’t hang up after waiting on hold.

Technology has advanced to the point that it’s transparent to customers – there’s no lag time on the phone or drive thru mic, and customer care experts have full access to the menu to answer questions, and place orders directly into the POS.

Here’s a look at the four primary benefits of transitioning to off premise support.

Increase Throughput Multiple trained agents can handle incoming calls and increase throughput at restaurants, resulting in more people getting through the door faster. A busy sandwich shop can take lunch orders from 10 customers at a time instead of one at a time. There’s no telling how many customers may have hung up after waiting on hold. Each order taken through the off premise support center is incremental revenue for that location.

A certified restaurant agent can handle a complex catering order while other agents handle the daily transactions with no delays.

Orders can be taken faster in a quiet work environment, and entered directly into the restaurants POS instead of taking an order on a paper ticket and punching it in also.

Increase Order Size In our experience, restaurants increase their average order size by at least 10 to 15 percent due to our up-selling initiatives. Our phone agents are trained just like your in-store staff and understand the opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell, and are trained as well as incentivized to up-sell on every order.

As much as people are focused on mobile ordering, call-in orders still outweigh mobile ordering 4 to 1 on average and allow an opportunity to up-sell.

Improve Customer Experience Centralized, well-trained off premise support reps can handle orders in a consistent fashion in keeping within a company’s brand standards and standard procedures. Customers love not waiting on hold, and being able to talk with a phone agent that can hear their order clearly. Agents can up-sell and cross-sell, giving educated answers about menu items that lead to increased sales.

Save Money With rising labor costs and wage inflation restaurants, have been searching for ways to bring costs down. We’ve seen clients cut costs by 30 to 50 percent by streamlining drive thru, catering, and call in order taking by utilizing our off premise restaurant support teams.

Restaurant operators cut costs by reducing labor and potentially smaller real estate footprint in designing store layouts. You’ll get the benefit of having a larger staff to handle orders quickly without the labor costs.

Let’s talk about how TSD Global can help make your restaurants more profitable. We'll share some real world examples of clients that turned around their bottom line. Contact us today!