Fast Food Drive Thru Improvement Tips

Does your fast food franchise have a drive through, aka drive thru? This option can increases your business, especially during the lunch and dinner hours. During these times, busy people who are in a hurry want to grab a meal and get back to work or home to their families. If your customers don’t get the service that they expect and pay for, they will not have a pleasant or positive drive thru experience. In fact, it might be enough to turn them off on your restaurant at whole. To keep this from hurting your business, use these tips to improve your drive thru system.

These are just some of the problems that happen in fast food drive thrus. If they’re happening at your location, you have a big problem. Part of the allure of fast food is in its title – it’s fast. If you’re drive thru regularly turns into a parking lot, then you’re no longer fast, and people can see it. You have no idea how many potential customers drive past your business when they see cars lined up around the building.

Your Drive Thru Must be Fast

Who uses fast food drive thrus? People who are hungry and in a hurry, that’s who. If you’re drive thru regularly has a line of cars wrapped around the building, through the parking lot, and almost out in the road, you do not have a fast drive through. Sadly, this scenario is becoming the norm for more fast food restaurants. Here are some of the reasons that jam up your drive thru system:

1. Not enough food prepared, particularly at crucial times. (How many times have your customers had to wait at the window, or be asked to “pull up,” because you’re waiting for fries or another menu staple?)
2. You’re crew is unable to handle special orders in a timely fashion. (Every fast food restaurant will get that one drive thru customer who wants a cheeseburger with extra cheese, no ketchup, and onions on pickles on half the sandwich.)
3. Faulty registers and credit card scanning systems. (Having to scan a customer’s credit/debit card slows them down, and everyone else behind them in line.)
4. Workers not at the windows when they should be. (This allow can be enough to get an impatient customer to drive away and take their business elsewhere.)

If any of these problems are a regular occurrence at your fast food restaurant, then you have a problem. Here are some things you can do to help remedy the situation and put that “fast” back in your fast food:

1. Studying your numbers to identify when your peak breakfast, lunch, and dinner times are.
2. Having enough members of your staff on the floor to handle these rush times.
3. Make sure your drive thru crew has the proper training and maturity level needed to handle this responsibility.
4. Renegotiate your cooking schedule to ensure you have hot, fresh food ready to go, especially during rushes.
5. Invest in new point-of-sale and credit card processing equipment to eliminate delays.
6. Install multiple-order-point drive thrus to help improve speed and capacity.
7. Once you have all of these things in place you can look into mobile-order and curbside pick ups to improve your service options.

Improving Drive Thru Order Accuracy

The experience starts at the drive thru speaker box at ends when your customer leaves your parking lot. Between these two points, there are many opportunities for things to go wrong. While some fast food owners will often blame most drive thru problems on “the box,” there are usually more mundane reasons that orders get messed up. More often than not, it’s human error. Employees working the drive through can’t be socializing with co-workers, playing on their cellphones, or doing anything else that could distract them from doing their job.

The key to finding mature fast food employees is up to you, the restaurant owner. Take your time during the interview process to find someone who will be mature enough to take order accurately. The people who fulfill the orders at the other window must be mature and hardworking, too. One of the best ways to do this is to ask open-ended questions that force candidates to reveal more about themselves through their answers. This is just one of many tips you can use to for hiring fast food employees.

Here are some other ways that many fast food restaurants improve drive thru order accuracy:

1. Set team objectives and track and measure their progress. Share this data with your staff so they’re aware of their order accuracy and what needs to be improved.
2. Train your managers and staff on their menu knowledge and their ability to quickly assist guests.
3. Have packaging routines in place to quickly provide napkins, straws and condiments. This eliminates waste and enhances speed.
4. Empower your managers to improve communication, time and accuracy. Use incentives to hit your goals.
5. Menu boards that are focused on pushing meal combos can increase the number of combos sold, which are easy to fill and improve revenue.
6. Digital menu boards that advertise high-margin items. Why not use bright colors and moving images to sell these big ticket items.

A Friendly Fast Food Drive Thru

“What do you want?” is the last thing anyone should hear through a drive thru speaker box. Customers also don’t want their money or credit/debit cards snatched from their hands by an impatient fast food employee. These and other detestable behaviors are the mark of a bad drive thru experience, and they happen at fast food restaurants across the country. They could be occurring at your restaurant if you’re not paying attention to how your employees interact with customers.

Consider this customer review left on TripAdvisor.com about one location of a popular fast food chain:

“My family and I tried to order food using 2 coupons, we were RUDELY asked how many people were in our vehicle, there was 4, and then we were RUDELY told they usually only allow 2 coupons per order, we had 2 coupons so I am still not sure what their problem was. We were also the ONLY ones in the drive thru. They were not busy in the least. There were 2 different RUDE employees taking our order and speaking through the drive thru speaker. Needless to say, we did not get our food and proceeded to leave immediately. I have never experienced such rude and tacky customer service in [this city] before. We will not be back. [The restaurant’s owners] needs to do an evaluation on their employees ASAP.”

You don’t want a review like this for your restaurant, do you? Then perhaps it’s time to pay close attention to what’s going on in your drive thru. Search for customer complaints online and listen to what customers tell you in person. You can even go through your own drive thru to see how your employees treat you when they think you’re a customer? If you find your employees to be abrasive to customers, it’s time to retrain your staff or hire a new one. Remember that your fast food franchisor has specific scripts and best practices for its franchisees’ drive thrus. Perhaps it’s time to get back to basics?

Improve Dine-In Experience with DIRECTV

If you follow the tips above, you can improve the drive thru experience at your fast food restaurant. As a restaurant owner, you should also want to boost the business in your dining room. Your customers will love to watch their favorite shows while they dine in your restaurant. They might even stay longer and order more food and drinks, in returns. You and your staff will also enjoy watching satellite TV programming on your breaks. Signal Connect is an AT&T Authorized Dealer that’s brought DIRECTV to many fast food restaurants. We can do the same for you! We’re sure that you have questions about DIRECTV for fast food restaurants. Our reps will answer all your questions and explain how the process works. Just give us a call at 888-233-7563, or fill out the form below.