Friday, June 25, 2021
The global QSR market was valued at $610.23 billion in 2020, with increasing growth in home delivery and self-service categories, according to ResearchAndMarkets. Researchers credited its resilience to rapid adaptation. Hybrid models, rapidly deployed during the crisis, combined online fulfillment with in-store services, enabling large brands and midsize organizations to serve customers in person, digitally and online, they added.
In addition, cashier-less terminals became part of a cohesive, consistent QSR payment experience, Jones told The Green Sheet. "Organizations realized that [customer] trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, and once you've lost it, it's incredibly difficult to get it back," he said.
Jones recalled going to a local pub-restaurant to celebrate his middle son's birthday in 2020, not realizing it would be his family's last public gathering for at least a year. However, numerous organizations remained open and delivered services safely and conveniently by investing in digital technologies, he noted.
Jones observed that QSR investments included proper workforce attire and safe, socially distanced environments, and former conveniences, such as having an online presence or digital ordering app, became ways to not just grow sales but to remain viable. As result, today's customers have more choices of where to buy goods and food services, he added.
"The post-pandemic world offers many different ways to get things delivered or get access to the things to buy, and I think organizations have awakened to that and QSR has in particular really embraced it," Jones said. "And while that does bring some challenges, COVID definitely helped accelerate people's focus on the digital age."
Throughout the pandemic, Worldline supported QSR and grocery verticals by keeping things simple and up and running, Jones stated. "There's a big sense of responsibility to minimize any changes to our services and cloud servers during a crisis, to make sure people are getting food and vital services, so we minimized changes to our platforms," he said. "We made sure we had appropriate levels of support in place to facilitate a joined-up customer experience."
Jones further noted that the rapidity of change during COVID created fragmentation and complexity in the QSR space, as franchises forged fast relationships to fulfill changing customer preferences.
"Customers wanted to interact in a different way, which meant different payment partners doing different things for the same organization," he said. "The challenge with that approach is it can lead to a lack of consistency in the customer experience, which can cause inefficiencies even from a QSR perspective, because it involves different contracts for support arrangements and can get quite complex."
In a perfect world, Jones stated, a QSR would manage the entire cardholder journey to allow a customer to start a transaction in one channel and complete it in another, and this would be done by tokenizing sensitive data at the initial point of interaction.
"For example, if someone decided to order online by placing a deposit and paying the balance when they get to the restaurant, Worldline can make that come together seamlessly," he said, adding that the QSR organization would also be able "to look at what's happening with their card payments, how many people are spending money online, how many people using an app, how many people using stuff in store so they can use it for actionable insight as well."
Worldline provides a payment system that spans across all the channels that a merchant may have, and plans are underway to launch a solution that allows franchisees to become more self-sufficient, Jones noted. Smaller franchisees could also work with franchise QRS to benefit from economies of scale and standardized technology that remains compliant and suitable for months and years ahead, he added.
"As we learned during COVID, things change so quickly that people had to make decisions quickly," Jones said. "Making sure that people have the right investments, not just for now but for the next three to five years and beyond, is really important."
In addition, having a forward-looking digital strategy, beyond just something that works today, having flexibility, will also be important, Jones observed, adding that when organizations look at all the different channels where they will serve customers, they need to create an experience that is consistent, simple, familiar and reassuring and safe as well.
In the future, Jones expects to see more self-service kiosks in QSRs because people feel safer at kiosks than in face-to-face commerce. He noted that some countries are using self-service in the drive thru area, and these technologies can help reduce costs, improve speed and throughput, and create a more elegant experience.
Jones emphasized that service providers need to spend time in the wild and get feedback from customers to understand preferences and dislikes, then build a plan around it. Payments industry professionals have a very narrow view of what we think is the right way to do things, he added.
"We understand our technology, our services, our solutions and what works, what doesn't work," Jones said. "But there are gaps in our knowledge. QSR surveys and customer data can help us tap into that information and make most use of it. And the last thing I would just say, is channels need to be viewed as complementary, not competitive."
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