Friction in the customer journey cost Australian businesses $43.4 billion last year. (1)
In a new Facebook series, global futurist Anders Sörman-Nilsson talks to business leaders to find out how they are striving to match customer expectations. This week he speaks to KFC South Pacific marketing director Michael Forster
If you were to look for the definition of a business sector which needs to provide a frictionless customer experience it would be the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry. The clue is in the name.
For half a century these businesses have pioneered new systems to create repeatable processes to get their hungry customers their chicken as fast as they can, and avoid serving soggy chips.
So it’s not surprising that in an increasingly digital era, where customers are expecting everything to be more convenient than ever, these brands are often at the cutting edge of innovation.
As KFC South Pacific’s marketing director Michael Forster points out, while the products remain the same, the routes for customers to get their hands on them have changed dramatically, and today may not even involve talking to a human being.
“We've seen huge growth across our digital channels, but it's not just doubling down on major growth channels, which are our app and delivery. It’s also about learning fast and building capability for the future,” explains Forster.
“We think that voice is going to be huge. So we launched re-ordering through Alexa, and enabled ordering directly from Messenger. This means that as our consumers move to these places, we're not behind the eight ball.”
Challenges of the digital age
But new ordering opportunities across Amazon Alexa and Facebook Messenger can also add unexpected layers of complexity to a business, and complexity is often the cause of friction for the customer. So how has KFC addressed this?
“It's overwhelming if each one of those [new ordering channels] brings with it a new process,” says Forster. “In that scenario you were taking what was one business and actually turning it into six, seven or eight different businesses and expecting the team to somehow handle that and keep the base business alive. It's just not realistic.”
Forster says they leveraged their existing systems to come up with new back-end processes to streamline these new channels, ensuring these new inputs added and did not take away from the existing business.
Retaining an edge
In such a competitive category it is vital for brands to stay at the forefront of innovation, or risk losing share to competitors who are also ruthlessly focused on improving their customer experience.
Forster explains where he looks to for inspiration: “The people who do a brilliant job are usually digitally native businesses that have a tonne of customer data and quite often longer purchase journeys.
“And so we look at what they’re doing - everything that's fantastic - then we ask how much of that applies if I'm just buying a Box Meal? I don't know if people are really thinking about it in the same way as long haul flight.
“So you're going to take the best principles and make them right for yourself. And for us that’s recognition that a Zinger Box might be the happiest moment of your lunch, but it's not the most important moment of your day.”
Critics say a move towards digitisation can feel like an impersonal experience for customers who are used to human interactions at the counter.
But for global business strategist Anders Sörman-Nilsson this is not the case: “In this new world, the thing that excites me is that in many ways it can be a more digitally humanised experience. In the olden days of QSR every time somebody came up to the counter and paid with cash, for example, it was an anonymous purchase and you had to restart the conversation.”
Now, for example, the KFC app will remember past orders and allow you to replicate them at the press of a button, creating a more personalised experience.
Another personalised part of the puzzle from KFC’s perspective was the introduction of a ‘Secret Menu’ in the app - which gives KFC fans access to bespoke menu items designed by KFC Team Members ‘who know how to hack the menu better than anyone’, according to Forster.
But this is one instance where Forster wants customers to feel a little friction - in this case by making it deliberately hard to discover, leaving it to staff to tell their customers about it and allow word to spread organically.
He says: “We don't go out and tell people about it. We actually made it pretty hard to find - you've got to want to find the secret menu. So for us it was a way to really live up to our promise that we think that our people on the front lines are really our brand.”
See more interviews from the Zero Friction Future series and find resources to help your business start to tackle these challenges by clicking here.
Source:
1) Boston Consulting Group Data Analysis, Mar 2018. Exchange rate used as $1 USD = $1.49 AUD from XE.com, Sep 2019
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