Customer Interaction Solutions for the Restaurant Industry Few businesses benefit as much from increases in customer loyalty as restaurants where loyalty translates directly into faster and more frequent return visits. Restaurants are facing ever-increasing competition and more fickle customers with many alternatives.  Furthermore, they are challenged with ensuring consistent quality across locations, particularly when franchising is involved. Customer satisfaction is the key to repeat business and growth for restaurants. Dissatisfied customers not only defect, but on average they tell ten people about their bad experience. The contact center is increasingly used to identify and resolve issues that impact customer satisfaction. Improved guest relations can drive increased loyalty, transforming negative experiences into positive ones, while identifying operational issues that affect customer satisfaction. Our contact center solutions can address these key questions: How do you know if your customers are (or aren't) satisfied? How can you be sure franchisees or local operators are handling complaints properly?  Is a consistent experience being delivered across all outlets? Can individual outlets or regions that are negatively impacting brand image be identified? Can you quickly and accurately address customer concerns when health scares like Mad Cow receive publicity? Astute's contact center solutions strike a balance between local problem resolution and central data collection and analysis. Contact data is collected in a single database through the contact center providing maximum visibility and value of the data to the enterprise, while relevant contact details can be routed to individual locations and managers to aid in complaint resolution. Individual managers can be alerted in-real time of contacts that may indicate problems with food quality. Furthermore, contact center reports can aid in identifying issues associated with individual outlets. Increasing Agent Efficiency and Effectiveness ePowerCenter™ improves the speed of response and efficiency of contact center agents, while it increases the value of customer feedback to the organization. It provides call centers the ability to manage all consumer interactions, whether the interaction is over email, chat, telephone, letter/fax, or Web form. Email can be integrated with other interaction channels and added to knowledge base available to agents. ePowerCenter’s advanced contact tracking, ease-of-use and sophisticated knowledge management capabilities enable restaurants to ramp up agents quickly. In addition, ePowerCenter can help to manage bursts of interactions due to promotional efforts or press activity. Expanding the Contact Center Astute’s ReferralCenter™ creates the opportunity for multi-location chains to drive issue resolution to the restaurant level while retaining the ability to collect, analyze and use customer data at the corporate level. ePowerCenter can provide companies the ability to capitalize on a non-traditional, flexible, remote workforce by establishing a ‘virtual call center’ for handling consumer inquiries. Reporting Tedious manual fulfillment and reporting processes can be eliminated and ePowerCenter’s notification feature can be utilized to quickly identify issues that impact customer satisfaction. ePowerCenter’s reporting can help to implement metrics in order to evaluate menu items. ePowerCenter’s sophisticated reporting allows customer feedback to be analyzed and distributed across the organization while threshold-based reporting provides fast identification of issues affecting product quality. ePowerCenter™ Business Intelligence provides seamless integration of contact center data with in-house reporting tools for an even greater understanding of customers. Surveys The ability to manage interactions across channels and assist agents with automated or guided response is essential when breaking news creates a sudden spike in customer interactions. ePowerCenter’s outbound surveying capabilities can even be used to proactively solicit customer feedback on product introductions or changes. Benefits to the Restaurant Industry Improved Contact Center Performance Reduces training times for agents Improves email response time Improves efficiency: the ability to handle large increases in consumer interactions while not increasing staff Improves the contact center’s ability to build loyalty and drive product sales Results in elevation of contact center’s status within the organization and increased value to business Better Use of Information Increases the value of customer data to the organization Enhanced utilization of customer feedback to drive product decisions Rapid identification of product quality issues Improves visibility of consumer information across the enterprise Integrates data into one repository of information Support for email alerts drives product sales based on conditions specific to customers Improved Company Performance Improves management decisions, particularly in the areas of marketing, purchasing, and quality control Early warning and problem detection: identify and resolve crisis issues quickly through automated e-mails System flexibility to support an rapidly growing and diversifying business Ability to quickly adapt to changing business and customer needs

Learn how McDonald's benefited from ePowerCenter!