JSC WenGeorgia and Wendy’s – An International Fast-Food Restaurant
JSC WenGeorgia is Wendy’s franchisee in the Republic of Georgia. Wendy’s is one of the largest global restaurants with more than 6,800 restaurants in 31 countries and territories with a vision of becoming the world’s most thriving and beloved restaurant brand. Wendy’s takes pride in serving high quality food, offering friendly service, and living up to its motto “Quality is Our Recipe” in everything it does. The brand was built around three basic tenets: Do the Right Thing, Treat People with Respect, and Give Something Back.
Wendy’s has been developing its international business for more than 40 years and currently operates more than 950 restaurants in Canada, in the APMEA and in the LAC regions. It recently announced a new incentive program that the brand expects to accelerate their global unit growth in 2022 by more than 3%. The company expects to have approximately 8,000 global Wendy’s restaurants by the end of 2025. Wendy’s strong supplier relationships and its commitment to evolve its menu to best serve the local consumer reflects the company’s brand DNA of made-to-order, freshly prepared quality ingredients, affordability and convenience.
Wendy’s restaurant. Source: Unsplash.
Drive-thru: A Growth Opportunity
The fast-food industry is fiercely competitive. Customers not only expect great food and competitive pricing, but also speedy and great service. As such, the drive-thru option has always been an important offering of a fast-food restaurant. During the pandemic, when indoor dining was prohibited, fast food restaurants benefitted as they were the most well-equipped to handle low contact, out-of-the-door dining options. In fact, for Wendy’s, its drive-thru business jumped to approximately 90% of its business mix during this time. It is no surprise that Wendy’s management team has stated that one of its focuses is to open drive-thru only restaurants. In alignment with this, JSC WenGeorgia also sees the Wendy’s drive-thru as an important component to its success.
Drive-thru experience. Source: Pexels.
Driving Customer Loyalty & Personalizing Drive-thru Experience with ALPR
Recently, JSC WenGeorgia opened a brand-new drive-thru restaurant and wanted to understand how it can increase traffic to the site, to differentiate between new and repeat clients and improve customer service. After exploring different options, the company chose to use ParkPow’s parking management system and Plate Recognizer’s leading automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) solutions to capture data for this initiative. To start, the company selected five drive-thru restaurants for this pilot program. It installed one camera per drive-thru and purchased the ParkPow and Plate Recognizer Streaming licenses. In all, it took Wendy’s one day to deploy our solutions.
David Gugava
One of the key parts of this program is to differentiate between new and repeat customers. Using the camera installed at the drive-thru, Plate Recognizer’s ALPR is able to capture the license plate numbers of the cars as it queues up for the drive-thru. This information can then be accessed using the easy-to-use ParkPow dashboard. Since ParkPow stores the frequency of visits of any vehicle, it can provide reports and notify the drive-thru staff on which customers are repeat and which ones are new. By doing so, the company can develop programs that reward loyal patronage and incentivize new customers to become repeat ones.
Drive-thru at night. Source: Pexels.
The Results
To accomplish the above, the company launched several initiatives, including providing free food offerings to returning customers and personalizing the customer experience by greeting customers by name at different touch points during the drive-thru process.
George Mshvildadze
More Ways to Leverage ALPR in the Drive-thru Experience
In addition to the programs JSC WenGeorgia has launched, ALPR can be leveraged to further enhance revenue and the customer experience.
- Smart Menu Boards – Delighting a customer by remembering his/her favorite order is a hallmark of great customer service. Rather than showing a generic menu, the drive-thru menu can highlight the customer’s previous and favorite orders, such as Dave’s Single with no onions, to increase throughput and customer satisfaction. The plate information can be sent via Plate Recognizer industry-standard webhooks to the company’s POS to deliver this experience.
- Increasing Throughput – Plate Recognizer registers when a vehicle enters and exits the drive-thru queue and management can access this information on the dashboard to see how long it takes to service a customer. In addition, ParkPow records how many vehicles are at the drive-thru at any point in time. Knowing this information will enable management to make changes to improve the flow of operations and staff accordingly to decrease the time a customer needs to wait for their food. Ultimately, this will lead to higher throughput and happier customers.
- Pay-By-Plate – Plate Recognizer’s ALPR can also enable pay-by-plate whereby customers going through Wendy’s drive-thru can be matched with payment information provided by the customer. Payments can then be processed automatically for their orders. This will result in nearly contactless and speedier transactions.
George Mshvildadze
Wendy’s restaurant. Source: Pixabay.
Our Partnership
We are delighted to be part of the solution to help JSC WenGeorgia to continue Wendy’s long tradition of focusing on the customer experience.