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Case study: KFC and Deliverect

By Restaurant

- Last updated on GMT

Delivery technology integration KFC Deliverect

Related tags KFC Deliverect Fast food delivery Casual dining

Since June 2020, KFC's Spanish and French business has been working with Deliverect to optimise its online delivery operation, which has been scaled up rapidly during the pandemic.

The pandemic has seen KFC focus on ramping up its already growing delivery offer. The fried chicken brand has over 23,000 locations across the globe and can now be considered a powerhouse of delivery, working with various third parties to get its food to people.

“Delivery is very important for KFC at the moment,” says KFC Iberia CFO João Almeida, “Before the pandemic, delivery was already very relevant. But post-COVID, online sales have more than doubled.”

Almeida says that KFC’s two principal challenges with delivery were having to manually enter orders from multiple delivery services and aggregators into the POS and - secondly - the relatively high volume of missing and wrong orders such a low-tech process created. Both issues are now well on the way to being solved thanks to Deliverect, which connects delivery third parties directly to a restaurants’ POS system, automating the online order process.

A key feature is that menus are managed centrally with orders sent directly to POS systems and printed in the kitchen with a standardised layout. “Each time we launch a new item or a new promotion, we can do it all by ourselves, pushing the menu to all the aggregators and stores in a matter of minutes,” says KFC Iberia head of IT Pedro Alcaina. 

A relationship built to last 

Almeida says that before KFC teamed up with Deliverect it had to ensure it was a reliable partner and that there was enough added value. But when the business case for Deliverect was presented to KFC’s franchisees they immediately saw the solution would quickly pay for itself. 

“I’d say that the biggest impact of Deliverect on KFC today is the management of peak hours. If you look at the peak hours of a restaurant pre-Deliverect and post-Deliverect, you can clearly see a major difference just by watching the way the staff is deployed. There’s much more focus. It’s not that fewer people are deployed, but that the same employees are deployed so differently.

"Before, the employee was just merely introducing the transactions in the till, dedicated exclusively to do that during the peak hours. Now, that same employee can be focused on improving the customer experience because these transactions are automatically going from the aggregators to the POS. There’s no more need for manual or human interaction.”

In the current phase of its partnership with Deliverect, KFC is  focusing on the automatic integration with the food delivery services and food delivery aggregators. Such businesses are playing a key role in KFC’s sales and it is this feature that franchisees value the most within the partnership. “But in my opinion we still have a long way to go, in the sense that we haven’t yet fully unlocked the entire potential of Deliverect. Today is just the beginning, we expect a long-lasting partnership,” says Almeida. 

Optimising operational efficiency

KFC is already exploring Deliverect’s menu management tools and is seeing big improvements when launching new items or new menu promotions. “Usually when you work with a different number of delivery platforms, you need to coordinate with each of them on how to create that promotion, and how to make it available online at a specific date. With Deliverect, we can just do it ourselves and push it out to all our delivery partners,” says Alcaina

According to Almeida, there are other metrics that KFC has been able to improve with Deliverect’s support. “We measure two indicators: the speed of service and the number of incidents. In terms of the first one, the time that each rider waits for their order at KFC has substantially decreased. We’ve also seen a substantial decrease in the number of incidents, reducing both missing and incorrect orders.”

Alcaina says that KFC is also happy with the Deliverect platform from a technical perspective. “Since the very beginning, when we piloted the first store, until today where we are running the solution in around 100 restaurants, we haven’t seen any kind of failure of the platform. Over 99% of the orders are correct and are injected into the restaurants without issues or additional information. And the remaining 1% of orders that come with an error, can easily be tracked in the Deliverect platform to check what the source of the problem is.”

Almeida confirms he couldn’t be happier with the partnership between KFC and Deliverect. “In my view, our partnership is a very strong one - especially at times when online transactions are going to be more and more relevant. We believe that this partnership will allow us to focus on our core, which is serving the customer with the best chicken in the world, while we leave the technical aspects to the experts at Deliverect.”

For more information about Deliverect head here. 

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