How Every Restaurant Can Deliver the Chick-Fil-A Experience — Without the Chick-Fil-A Budget

Chick-Fil-A, the Atlanta-based chicken sandwich chain that’s as famous for its playful billboards as for its impressive growth, ranked #4 among 100 well-known brands in a recent Harris Poll Reputation Quotient. (Only five restaurant brands even managed to make the running, with none but Chick-Fil-A breaking the top 50.)  

In terms of emotional appeal, the poll finds Chick-Fil-A ranks second only to Amazon, and its domestic system sales have grown to more than $9 billion, nearly doubling inside of five years. 

So, what’s the secret to Chick-Fil-A’s seemingly unstoppable success? What lessons does it hold for restaurant brands (and companies of all kinds, for that matter) looking to outpace their competitors?       

A reputation built on best-in-class customer experience (CX)

Chick-Fil-A has long understood it’s not so much in the business of selling chicken sandwiches as it is in creating an entire customer experience. This experience comes from the sum total of every point of interaction a customer has with the brand, from A to Z, and back again. 

Say, for example, you’re: 

Googling the location of your nearest Chick-Fil-A. 

Viewing a menu or receiving a digital coupon via your mobile device. 

Ordering online or taking a customer satisfaction survey. 

Engaging in-person with restaurant staff. 

Picking up a to-go meal at the drive-through.  

Paying for your waffle fries at the POS. 

Simply enjoying a Spicy Deluxe chicken sandwich. 

These are all touchpoints along the customer journey, and Chick-Fil-A is a master of seamlessly integrating, optimizing, and activating them.  

CX and the frictionless future

For restaurant brands, CX increasingly depends on using technology to eliminate “friction” between the multiple touchpoints of the customer journey.  

The restaurant industry is headed into a frictionless future, and technology-driven CX is rapidly becoming the table stakes for remaining competitive. 

Chick-Fil-A deeply understands this and is among the most visible restaurant brands to capitalize on this technology. 

Using an app on their mobile device, dine-in guests can now walk into Chick-Fil-A, head straight to their table, and easily order (and pay) directly from their mobile device. 

From here, guests menu items are brought directly to their table, with options that let them request service, order additional items, or even speak to a manager. 

But there’s much more to it than might first meet the eye. 

Not only does this technology deliver a frictionless dining experience with real-time table monitoring, it also enables integrative data capture across POS, payment, promotions, customer survey, staff communications, guest service, and more. 

But why is integrative data capture such a big deal? 

Let’s take a look.

A complete picture of the customer journey

To successfully compete and scale in a digital age, restaurant brands must rely more and more on AI-driven applications. 

To do this, they normally have to contract with multiple technology vendors and invest in multiple software suites. 

This is their only choice if they want to capture the critical data (the “puzzle pieces”) that they rely on for visibility and insight into the customer journey. 

But here’s the rub. 

This piecemeal approach is cumbersome, costly, and in many ways ineffective because these different vendors and software suites don’t “talk” to each other (aren’t integrative).

Said differently, piecemeal data capture leaves restaurant brands with just that — pieces of a larger puzzle but not an integrative, complete picture of the customer journey. 

Without a complete picture, it’s impossible to accurately identify and capitalize on the hidden growth opportunities that only integrative data-capture from actual customers can reveal. 

Growth opportunities that come from knowing, for example, not just what customers are buying, but who is buying, why they’re buying, and how they can be inspired to greater levels of engagement and loyalty. 

The critical shift from data integration to data activation

The genius of the technology Chick-Fil-A has adopted is twofold. 

1. It enables data capture from actual customers. (This is necessary for generating true target-audience segmentation and effectively marketing to high, medium, and low-frequency guests.) 
2.  It essentially brings data capture under one, integrative roof. (This data can directly integrate with email/SMS loyalty programs, social media, and display-ad networks, as well as inform traditional advertising.) 

From here, brands leveraging this kind of technology can more effectively move from data integration to data activation, which is the next revolution in tech-driven CX. 

Data activation is what happens when integrative data insights are acted on in ways that bring personalization to scale and promote greater brand loyalty.  

Say, for example, you’re a restaurant brand that’s leveraging this technology. 

Data captured from an actual customer might provide the insight that they’re a big fan of a particular menu item.

Acting on this data, a digital coupon for this item could be auto-generated and sent to your customer’s smartphone. 

Data activation across the multiple touchpoints of the customer journey benefits brands as it much as consumers. 

It translates to dramatically improved marketing, optimized menus, more personalized guest-service, reduced labor costs, increased profits, greater compliance with industry regulations, and more. 

How to offer the Chick-Fil-A experience...without the Chick-Fil-A budget

It’s no secret that relative to most businesses, Chick-Fil-A has a monster budget. 

But this doesn’t mean that leaner restaurant brands can’t afford to offer the same frictionless, tech-driven CX.

In the last few years, restaurants have been turning to automation and technology to solve their challenges...only to find themselves having to juggle multiple hardware and software systems, leading to even more frustration. 

The idea of having one comprehensive solution that works with their current infrastructure is highly appealing. And, it happens to be a fraction of the cost.

That’s where OneDine comes in. 

It is the industry’s most comprehensive server-to-guest solution. 

From tableside ordering and payment to better data intelligence, it offers a single, simple, cost-effective solution for increasing restaurant sales, elevating service, and create an overall frictionless dining experience. 

In fact, customers love it so much that the 2 million seed round came completely from restaurateurs who wanted to implement this in their establishments. 

Regardless of their budget, restaurant brands of all sizes can offer the same best-in-class CX that Chick-Fil-A has built its reputation and success on, delivering a frictionless future, today.