AI Order Takers have really taken off in the last year, with many franchise owners beginning new pilots, and national QSR brands scaling out wider into multi-location enterprise deployments.
It turns out, however, that drive-thru AI Order Takers can do more than merely automate the order taking process. There are many innovative marketing capabilities that can be built into an AI Order Taker. These features enable additional revenue streams and turn the drive-thru into its own marketing channel. Let’s look at some of these capabilities.
AI Upselling
AI solutions for drive-thrus offer QSR owners and operators many benefits: greater check sizes, larger transaction counts, reduced labor costs, and actionable insights. One of the ways they achieve this is through automated, built-in, always-on, algorithmic upselling. This upselling capability, it turns out, can achieve superior conversion rates to human team members. How is this possible?
First, AI-based upselling built into the conversational logic of an AI Order Taker is persistent; it is always on. Human team members actually miss a surprisingly high number of opportunities to upsell, varying with the specific QSR location, specific team member, and even conditions of a given shift. People get distracted, or sick, or busy. AI does not.
Atop AI’s persistence, AI Order Takers can include sophisticated, conditional logic that optimizes revenue through algorithmic consideration of multiple factors. Algorithmic upselling is contextual to the order, of course, but it can also be customized in accordance with specific location and daypart rules. A special promotion run locally featuring add-on items in a given town or at a given time can be offered, as appropriate, per promotional plans.
AI Order Takers also know when to back off – literally. Ensuring maximal throughput of the drive-thru lane is critical during busy times, and there is little point in offering multiple upsells at multiple points during ordering if it means extending wait times for cars in line to the point that some customers decide not to queue up at all and instead drive to a competitor’s location. Drive-thru AI Order Takers can speed up the ordering process, too, using shorter sentences, and offering fewer opportunities for guests to pause to consider offers. During busy times, getting everyone processed quickly is critical both for guest satisfaction and for revenue optimization.
Brand Voice
“Voice” can be thought of to refer not just to audio-based data, but to the attributes of a brand. Every brand has their own brand voice. All the emotional associations and attributes of a QSR’s brand make up its voice. Sophisticated voice AI technologies in AI Order Takers offer the brands and franchise owners a chance to really leverage the best of their “voice” at the drive-thru lane.
First, the language that an AI Order Taker constructs – its word choice, rhythms, sentence structure, timing, delivery – can all be customized to conform to and extend the QSR’s brand. When a drive-thru guest speaks with an AI Order Taker, that guest doesn’t interact with the voice of a given team member, the guest interacts with the voice of the QSR brand, in a very literal sense. The specific words, phrases and sentences that an AI Order Taker generates in conversation with guests all sound very much like a part of the brand they represent.
Cloned Voices
Beyond seeming to use the words and phrasing associated with a brand, some AI Order Takers offer a feature called Cloned Voices. Clones Voices allow a QSR to sample a particular, actual voice, and use that during Order Taking conversations at the drive-thru.
Combined with national celebrity spokespeople, this can be very powerful. Imagine having a famous actor or sports figure in a national campaign for a QSR brand, and, as part of that promotion, using that actor’s voice to take orders. Local celebrities also, in many cases, make terrific voices for the drive-thru. These cloned voices can be used perpetually, or rotated in and out seasonally in accordance with various promotional and marketing campaign phases.
Testing and Optimization
What upsell works better with burgers, french fries or onion rings? Or is it better to offer both options? Does this vary with the time of day, or location – or the type of burger?
AI Order Takers offer the ability to run A/B and multivariate testing at a very sophisticated and automated level. By offering different options and seeing which overall performs best, QSRs can learn what promotions and limited time offers work best. This is a capability even the best human teams couldn’t match.
The Future of AI-Powered Drive-Thrus
Drive-thru AI Order Takers do more than merely take orders in a more cost-effective way than human team members. They provide a new marketing channel for franchise owners and brands to drive revenue, build loyalty, and increase guest satisfaction. If you are considering AI Order Taker solutions for your drive-thru locations, we encourage you to download our Buyer’s Guide to help you frame what technologies, capabilities, and features to look out for. The Guide also offers an Evaluation Matrix that you can adapt to score various vendors’ offerings.
You can download your Buyer’s Guide here.
