The high potential of quick service restaurant franchises is no longer a secret. A fast-dining guest experience at an affordable price while knowing exactly what to expect from your order makes the QSR restaurant concept attractive for many customers. But is this enough to keep a QSR franchise brand successful?
Not really. There’s one imperative factor to consider when planning your franchise chain priorities: the digital mindset of the modern consumer that comes with a load of expectations for convenience and comfort. According to Incisiv, digital sales will exceed offline sales in the QSR business model by 2025, so keeping up with customer needs and competition requires a strong ecommerce presence.
Still, expanding your quick service restaurant sales and management online can be a real challenge without a multi-view approach to the process. We used our QSR experience to sum it up for you.
The Good | Why Expand Your Quick Service Restaurant Franchise Ecommerce Capabilities
- Keep consistency across franchises. For franchise brand owners, ensuring brand and customer experience consistency across franchises can become overwhelming. But equipping your quick serve restaurant with a full set of digital tools to update menus, promotions, or working hours makes it simpler than you’d think.
- Reach your customers where they are. Digital devices are a constant presence in your customers’ daily routine. Almost everything can be ordered online, so why make food an exception? Adapt to their ever-changing buying habits using the most flexible tool of all: ecommerce.
- Start making data-driven decisions. Can you easily find out what’s the most profitable QSR franchisee and why? Do you know your customers’ preferences for menu items, payment methods or delivery? Just imagine how easy your decision-making gets if you have all the necessary data one click away.
- Stay in control. One of the greatest parts of digital franchise management is having complete oversight of the franchises while staying flexible with local changes. Think of a fast, in-sync change of the main menu across locations that can be adapted by every local franchise manager to fit their needs.
The Bad | What’s Challenging about Online Franchise Management
- Time is key. Waiting for QSR digital transformation is not an option for your customers, and standing out in QSR franchising is a race against the clock. That’s why scalability and time to market are crucial in accelerating your journey to reaching customers where they are now ordering food.
- Finding the right tech stack. Not all solutions fit your specific business needs. Before choosing the digital way, make sure you understand your business context, audience and priorities.
- Choosing a suitable partner. Consider the specific needs of the quick serve restaurant industry and choose a digital transformation partner with proven expertise in this field. Just like you wouldn’t choose an experienced carpenter to be the lead chef in your restaurant, choose a digital provider with a relevant portfolio for your business profile.
The Solution
We’re aware that expanding your digital commerce capabilities is a tough decision, but our data-backed experience says that its benefits considerably outweigh its dilemmas.
Our greatest efforts went into building QSR-dedicated products that empower you to scale in new markets without interfering with your quality standards. Just look at our Quick Service Restaurants Accelerator. It has dedicated QSR capabilities for master brand and franchise management, order customization options, and delivery flexibility for your business to scale and save time with franchise updates. You get complete control of the franchise changes using a centralized dashboard that allows you to add, enable, or disable franchises and manage menu updates while providing local franchise managers the flexibility to make local adjustments on the menu, schedule, or delivery.
What’s more, we’re a trustworthy partner. We can adapt to a global perspective that requires consistency among markets while taking a local approach with market-specific needs.
