Why The Largest Restaurants Are Relying On Restaurant Call Centers

Recently the restaurant business has seen a rapid shift in communications practices. Restaurants are facing a rapid increase in labor costs and employee turn over. Restaurant executives have been on the hunt for a solution that can help lower labor costs, increase their sales, and improve their guest experience.

Restaurant Call Center’s have been created over the past couple years and are changing the way phone orders are handled. Call Centers have been around and can also be known as BPO’s or Business Process Outsourcing companies. Typically Fortune 500 restaurants utilize BPO’s to outsource their sales or customer service operations. Call Center’s agents are known to be amazing sales and customer service people, and that is starting to translate into quick service and fast casual restaurants.

Restaurant Call Center Services is often called off premise restaurant support. Restaurant call centers streamline every phone order for restaurants so that the employees on site can focus on delivering a great guest experience. The restaurant call center partner can focus on delighting customers that call in and up-sell when possible. With on-demand restaurant call center services you only pay per minute of when your call center team is on the phone.

This eliminates the need for a full time phone-ordering role inside the restaurant and typically saves the restaurant 30 - 50% on costs when compared to hiring this role internally. Another benefit restaurants are seeing is a dramatic increase in throughput when partnering with off-premise restaurant call centers. This increase in throughput occurs because the call center has a team of trained reps who are ready and able to handle catering or call-in orders at any time. Long hold times are eliminated because there are multiple virtual order takers ready to handle simultaneous calls.

Perhaps the largest benefit that restaurants are seeing from partnering with call centers is their increase in sales. In-house employees are not financially incentivized by up-selling. It’s simply just something they are told to do. However, restaurant call centers pay commission to their agents when successfully up-selling. Several restaurant call centers have mentioned that off-premise providers have increased their average order size by over 12%. Through this disruption in communications restaurants now have access to some of the greatest sales teams in the world and are reaping the benefits.

The next trend that restaurant call centers have been focused on is disrupting drive thru order taking. A few years ago this was attempted, but the technology wasn’t there to execute it correctly. Off-premise Restaurant Call Centers are saying they have cracked the code on this by coming out with a very cost effective pricing model for restaurant chains. Both restaurant executives and call centers are hoping that the results they are seeing with catering and takeout sales translates into the drive thru ordering function.

It has been a fascinating ride seeing all of the communication disruption happening. It will be very interesting to see how this all unfolds in the future.