The Challenge

Making the right call for phone-in orders

Choosing to support and supplement your digital ordering experience with call-in orders is a great way to give voice to your restaurant brand while delivering a truly personal touch. When selecting a phone-in solution though, what are your options and which is best for your business?

The Solutions

Three ways to call in.

When adopting a call-in solution for your restaurant, your options are traditional phone-in ordering, in-house call centres and outsourced call centres.

With traditional phone-in ordering, a restaurant brand utilises its own staff and resources to take call-in orders over existing (and usually fixed-line) telephone infrastructure. While this approach carries a minimal
cost, it often leads to greater inefficiency and operating issues because employees are asked to split their focus between in-store and phone-in customers: resulting in errors and a loss of revenue.

In addition, with no means to validate customer and address information, a restaurant doesn’t know when they are speaking to new or returning patrons and cannot confirm whether an address is within their approved delivery zone. Without a PBX solution, that allows for multiple calls at a time, call-in customers are often left frustrated because they are unable to place orders during peak trading hours.

An in-house call centre allows a restaurant to take full ownership of phone-in orders by bringing the experience under the direct control of the brand. The ability to guide and monitor a user’s ordering experience, utilising a dedicated team, is invaluable but often expensive; requiring extensive resources such as additional staff and IT equipment.

In most instances, in-house call centres need to be treated as completely separate businesses because they have their own operating nuances and core competencies. Ultimately, this can become a distraction for restaurant brands that should be focused on making food and servicing customers.

From a financial perspective, the overheads for an in-house call centre are also amortised using a much smaller revenue stream and unless a restaurant owner has multiple locations, it will be difficult to reach an economy of scale.

Contracting call-in orders to an independent call centre gives a restaurant brand direct control over their customer’s phone-in experience while eliminating the investment associated with an in-house call centre.

For a nominal monthly fee, restaurant owners receive a scalable solution designed to match their budget and needs—no matter their size—while professionally trained agents attend to customers who call to place an order. This leads to increased sales while providing restaurants with complete peace of mind because fewer phone-in orders are missed.

Comparing the performance of in-house and outsourced call centres*; outsourced solutions perform substantially better with 97% of calls answered compared to 83%, and only 3% of calls abandoned compared to 17% for in-house call centres.

When migrating to an outsourced call centre from an in-house solution, the total answer rate for call-in orders increases from 74% to 97%— for an overall improvement of 32%**. This value represents potential new revenue equalling tens of thousands of Rands per month and is over and above the operational savings enjoyed by migrating call centres.

Of the three call-in solutions discussed here, outsourced call centres provide the greatest value to restaurant brands thanks to lower operating costs, inclusive hardware and maintenance, expertly trained agents, and the ability to capitalise on that would otherwise be lost.