Dive Brief:
- The mobile app experience is essential to overall fast food experiences. Consumers rated overall quality of restaurant mobile apps at 86 and reliability of mobile apps at 85 on a 100-point scale in a study released last month by the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
- Customers gave overall order accuracy a 86, and speed of checkout or delivery scored 83.
- The best mobile apps help customers skip the line while enabling speedy and accurate service, according to Forrest Morgeson, associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University and director of research emeritus at the ACSI.
Dive Insight:
Mobile apps can drive better fast food experiences, but companies need to ensure they don’t become victims of their own success.
Customer satisfaction is driven by a basket of qualities, and not all are equal, according to Morgeson. Customers value accurate ordering and speedy service alongside mobile app quality.
"Some parts of that journey are more or less important than one another, but all of them add up to drive customer satisfaction,” Morgeson said.
Wendy’s successfully combined an improved mobile app with faster and more accurate in-restaurant service to drive sales in Q1 2024 despite an industrywide traffic decline.
The number of monthly active users on Wendy’s app grew 40% from the previous quarter to 6 million, and the mobile experience is a key part of the restaurant’s plan to make customers more loyal to the brand.
However, mobile apps are most effective when they are supported by other investments. A “mid-teens percent” of Starbucks mobile orders went uncompleted due in part to long wait times. The company is now taking steps to speed up order fulfillment via its Siren Craft System, a revamped drink-making process.
