Tech Tools Fuels Homegrown’s Focus on Off-Premise Delivery, Customer Service
When we launched our catering program four years ago with MonkeyMedia Software, our takeout and catering platforms were just coming into form. We knew takeout and catering were important components of our business, so we relied on the Catering Institute’s 5 Pillars of Successful Restaurant Takeout, Delivery, and Catering to help define our off-premise framework. The 5 Pillars are focused on leadership, sales and marketing, centralized services, operations, and delivery.
Using the 5 Pillars Business Framework, we established our leadership structure and a sales and marketing strategy that included the use of MonkeyMedia Software’s robust MONKEY CRM tool for enhanced data analytics. We use this tool in order to gain better insights into our guest’s experiences and interactions with our brand. The same MONKEY platform allowed us to standardize our operational procedures, and extended to the launch of an industry-leading online/mobile-web ordering solution for a better customer experience. Furthermore, this allowed us to centralize our call center support team as the MONKEY tool, along with its unified CRM and enterprise order management, provided our call center support team with visibility into the state of our business. With the business framework and software platform firmly in place to help us structure, standardize, and scale our off-premise program, the last hurdle we needed to solve – and the most complicated for us – was delivery. As our off-premise partner, we looked to MonkeyMedia Software to help solve our challenge of streamlining the logistics of delivery.
At the time, our delivery service was designed for our customer support team and there was no contact between our delivery drivers and our customers. The way our delivery drivers communicated with our support team was unsafe and a distraction to our drivers. Additionally, there was no way to track the guest experience when it came to our delivery service for catering.
Millennials make up a large portion of our customer base and consumer insights have shown us they want to know what is happening with their order – where it is in transit and when it will be delivered. We knew we had to make a change to our delivery process, yet we didn’t know where to begin.
Four years after our deployment of MONKEY, MonkeyMedia Software took the opportunity to partner with and integrate their MONKEY platform with Bringg’s Delivery Management Platform. The Delivery Management Platform is a customer-centric enterprise software set with one of its key feature being the enablement of text and e-mail communication between delivery drivers and customers. We launched the Bringg platform in May 2017 and have seen tremendous success as a result.
How it works:
We started integrating the Bringg platform into our operations by purchasing smartphones for our delivery drivers and installing the app. Once orders are placed through MONKEY, those orders are assigned to a store location for production, and ultimately to a selected delivery driver. Our drivers then log into the Bringg app about an hour before they hit the road to ensure everything they see on their phone matches their delivery paperwork for that day. With Bringg, our drivers can see their progression through the app and contact clients directly when needed.
Since that launch, our drivers have gained improved customer experience results as they now know where the clients are and how to contact them when they arrive at the delivery location. To date, 30 percent of our catering customers are tracking their orders through the Bringg platform. Additionally, our customer service representatives have a beneficial tool to safely stay in touch with our drivers and enable us to proactively reach out to clients if there are any delivery issues.
Prior to the integration between MONKEY and the Bringg app, we were blind to what our catering deliveries were in the process. We are now able to track, in real time, where orders are and when they are expected to be delivered -- from start to finish. Since we live in a text-based world, it seems this should be a standard service option for any restaurant brand offering takeout or catering delivery services.
With Bringg’s real-time tracking feature, our clients no longer need to contact our customer support team to inquire where their order is as they have that information right at their fingertips. We’re seeing, on average, shorter delivery times per order. As our teams handle between 50 to 65 catering deliveries on peak days, and about 95 percent of our orders are corporate catering orders, we can’t afford for something to go wrong.
Through our partnership with MonkeyMedia Software we now have a complete off-premise perspective that scales across our catering orders for delivery. Plus Bringg has provided us with a better customer experience on that final and very important touchpoint with our customers. The improved logistics tool to track what’s happening with our drivers now supports our delivery process even in new and unfamiliar markets. As we expand Homegrown, we now believe we have the solutions and partnerships in place to help us grow our off-premise sales.