There’s one thing most every quick-service restaurants has in common during lunch: a line.
Besides the battle of getting consumers to a storefront, for quick service restaurateurs the battle continues during the lunch rush, as consumers could show up, only to decide the line is too long and go elsewhere.
Pita Pit, a fast-food restaurant with 250 U.S. locations, has turned to digital ordering to shorten lines. There’s not much the restaurant can do in store, Kevin Sanders, vice president of brand marketing, said this week at the Connect Mobile Innovation Summit in Chicago, as each pita is made to order to the customer’s specifications.
But online ordering can speed up the process. A consumer can go online on a desktop or via his smartphone to Pita Pit’s app to place and pay for an order, and then come into the store to pick it up. These diners wait in a separate part of the shop to pick up their order, and don’t thave to stand in the line with customers waiting to place orders. New Pita Pit stores are being built with this separate waiting area, and most existing Pita Pit locations have space for this. However, not all locations do, and those stores do not offer this feature. About 85% of Pita Pit locations offer mobile or digital orders.
Besides offering a faster way for customers to get their grub, for Pita Pit those orders come with an added bonus: a nearly 100% higher ticket order than an average order, Sanders said. Sanders attributes this to several factors, including some franchisees putting a minimum dollar amount on a purchase and consumers often ordering ahead of time when they are feeding more than themselves. In order for a Pita Pit location to be searchable in the app and thus offer mobile ordering, the franchisee has to opt in to the program. Sanders wouldn’t give an exact price but said it was less than $1,000 per month for a franchise to be in the app program. Pita Pit uses mobile app developer Splick.it for its app.
Two years ago 80% of digital orders were on desktop and 20% were on mobile devices including those place in app for Pita Pit. Earlier this year, mobile increased to 25% of digital orders, and Sanders anticipates mobile ordering to only increase. In the last two years, the number of online orders increased 130%, Sanders said. That’s partly the result of more franchises signing up to offer digital ordering Sanders said, but he added that consumer adoption added to the uptick.
After a heavy marketing push in June, the Pita Pit app, which launched in 2011, now has hundreds of thousands of downloads per month, Sanders said.
Pita Pit also has a mobile payment system, in which customers can pay in store with her loyalty “Pit card” that is a plastic card, as well as with a digital card stored in her smartphone. This mobile payment method is much like Starbucks’ successful loyalty program, in which the payment is not linked to a credit card; instead the consumer downloads money to an account and draws on those funds when she orders.
Pita Pit introduced the digital card in March 2015. However, not every franchised restaurant accepts it because it requires a new payment terminal to scan the barcode off the customer’s smartphone, Sanders said. For locations that are using the digital loyalty card, it accounts for less than a quarter of sales, Sanders said.
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