Mr. Big

Bigari recognizes that the key to drive-thru is through-put, increasing the speed and volume of flow (see story). His drive-thrus are the last step of a massive assembly line that starts in the feedlots and potato fields and ends with a Quarter Pounder and fries coming through a car window. The more time he can shave off at the drive-thru, the more cars he can put through per hour -- and more cars equal more sales. But while the drive-thru may seem like the ultimate quick-service model, it's not conducive to maximizing speed. "The problem is that it is a linear-service model," Bigari says, "and that is a flawed model."

At a typical, single-lane drive-thru, if a customer feels like taking three minutes at the speaker box while he decides whether to get the six- or ten-piece Chicken McNuggets, every car behind him has to wait. Bigari installed side-by-side speaker boxes so that drivers could circumvent slower customers, but that created another wrinkle: sequencing. When a kitchen has two or three orders coming in at the same time from side-by-side speakers, how do you know which car is going to get to the drive-thru window first? Complicating that were myriad other drive-thru headaches -- from overstressed, multi-tasking order-takers to simple mistakes in the orders.

While Bigari was pondering how to work his way out of the box, a little software company half a continent away was quietly developing a solution. Exit41 Inc., a Massachusetts startup, had decided that the fast-food industry was long overdue for a technological overhaul. "Here was this huge industry that had been underserved by technology," says Craig Tengler, co-founder of Exit41. "The restaurant industry was still replacing glorified electronic calculators."

Exit41 started by developing high-end cashier software for the front counters, but it wasn't until Tengler met with Bigari a little over three years ago that the company discovered its full potential. They realized that what Bigari needed to improve the quality, accuracy and speed of his drive-thru business was a call center.

Today, none of the drive-thru orders at a Bigari McDonald's are taken by workers inside that store. The responsibility has been shifted to a fleet of employees located in the call center at Bigari Food Enterprises headquarters. Inside one big room are twelve cubicles, each containing a telephone, headset and computer. When a car pulls up to a speaker box, a magnetic detector buried in the drive-thru lane goes off, prompting an employee in one of the call-center cubicles to say into her headset, "Welcome to McDonald's, what can I get for you?" -- which is instantaneously piped out of the speaker box. As the customer relays his order, the employee enters it into her computer. Before she has a chance to say the cost of the meal, the order is displayed on a color-coded screen in the restaurant's kitchen just a few yards from the drive-thru customer, and the order is assembled and ready to go by the time the customer arrives at the drive-thru window. To avoid sequencing problems and ensure that the right meal goes to the right car, another computer screen inside the store shows a breakdown of the order along with a digital snapshot of the customer and his car. As the customer pays and drives away with his meal, the snapshot is erased.

The benefits of the drive-thru call center have been incalculable, Bigari says. Fast-food speed has always been dependent on a division of labor: One person grills the meat, another assembles the burger, another hands it to the customer. With the help of Exit41, Bigari took the principle one step further, isolating the pivotal task of order-taking from the restaurant's hustle and bustle. The result has been drastically increased drive-thru speeds, typically well under ninety seconds per order compared to a McDonald's national average of about two and a half minutes. Less time equals more sales; capacity begets volume. The specially trained, single-focus call-center employees are also more accurate. Bigari reports that mistakes have been cut in half, down to 1 percent of all orders.

The 35 or so call-center employees -- who keep the center staffed 24 hours a day and are paid an average of 25 to 50 cents more an hour than those preparing the food -- are taught the subtle arts of up-sell and suggestive sell. "Would you like a large soda with that?" they'll offer, or "Would you like a dessert today?" And Bigari has installed phones all over his restaurants that also lead to the call center. A customer can sit in one of his PlayPlaces, pick up a phone, place his order, swipe his credit card, and within minutes, his meal arrives on a shiny plastic tray. All told, Bigari says, the call center has saved his restaurants hundreds of thousands of dollars.