Chris Bright may not be a scientific genius, but the president of 88-unit zpizza says he smartly recognized chaos theory at work at his Newport, Calif.-based chain two years ago.
Repeatedly, customers would approach the counter to place an order and the telephone would ring. The customer service representative, or CSR, who took the call made counter customers wait, and Bright could see their frustration grow. He also suspected the CSR's rush to take the phone order gave those customers sub-standard service. And as lines at the counter grew and the phone queue backed up, those bottlenecks put additional pressure on the kitchen staff to not make any errors.
Bright commissioned an efficiency study that pointed to a call center as a possible solution to the problem. Counter workers could focus on the customers in front of them without the hassle of phones, and phone personnel could handle calls off-premise, away from the clamor inside stores, and for multiple stores at once.
Despite recent advances in online ordering, Bright and other operators say call centers are far from ready for the technology tar pits. While the use of online ordering is growing, call centers can solve numerous operational problems and many customers still prefer picking up the phone to tapping on a keyboard.
“No question things flow smoother in the stores with the call center,” Bright said.
The calm during the storm of a peak sales period is “amazing if you know the difference,” said Chris Cassano, vice president of Cassano's Pizza in Dayton, Ohio.
Growing up in the family business, Cassano was intimately familiar with the multitasking madness of juggling phone and counter orders and making pizzas. Stores are quieter without phones ringing, he said, which leaves all hands in the chain's 32 stores devoted to making and delivering food.
While zpizza's online orders are growing steadily, “we're not even at double-digit percentages yet É because most people still want to use the phone,” said Bright.
The same is true in Dayton, said Cassano, in reference to the city where the chain has operated for five decades.
“People are just used to calling us for now,” he said. “Online ordering will grow, but nowhere near fast enough to replace the call center soon.”
Bright loves online ordering, but he said it's not the magic bullet it's often portrayed to be, especially regarding its use in call centers. During zpizza's call center trial, staffers took phone orders using the chain's online ordering interface. The results weren't positive.
“We quickly found massive gaps between the online ordering interface and the conversational ordering process,” said Bright. “The online ordering process [at its best] just isn't the same transaction, so we abandoned that.”
Cassano said the company's call center platform, in use since 2003, is text-based and carefully mapped to follow the path of a natural conversational. The system is honed to promote speedier service and, he said he believes, humans upsell much better than pop-up graphics.
“They're trained to ask different things depending on each situation,” rather than a one-pitch-for-all approach, he said.
Mama Fu's Asian House in Austin, Texas, recently added a call center to improve service at its 14 units, but CEO Randy Murphy expects they'll enjoy the added benefit of employee retention. Reducing the chaos in stores reduces employee stress, he said, which he predicts will extend their time serving the company.
“We've had a lot of turnover at that position in the stores, and we wanted to avoid the brain drain going on with trained employees,” Murphy said. Though it considered outsourcing its call center, Mama Fu's kept its center in-house to control the customer service message and cross-utilize employees. “It gives us further use of people who might have worked for us part time; now they can give us full time,” he said.
Murphy said Mama Fu's online orders are increasing steadily and that he sees great promise for its group-ordering feature, which allows multiple customers to place a single order to Mama Fu's website rather than sending multiple emails.
“But it's going to be years and years before everyone moves over to that channel,” Murphy said. Phone orders still account for the bulk of transactions away from the counter, “so in the meantime, let's make that experience as good as possible for the customer and for us through upselling. It's a win-win,” he added.
Though outsourced call centers are becoming more popular and affordable, Cassano doubts the company would close its own because of its function as a real-time command center. With all the chain's stores in the Greater Dayton, Ohio, area, he can monitor the pace of business systemwide, move delivery drivers to stores that are slammed or control labor cost by checking how many employees are on the clock in slow stores.
“It gives us so much control over the business,” he said. “If we outsourced our call center, we'd have to give that up, and that's not smart.”
Bright said zpizza outsourced its call center because it decided “that's not our core competency É so we let someone else handle it.”
Akey benefit of the call center, Bright added, is better management of orders received and handled by Hispanic customers and employees.
“Our Hispanic workforce and those employees learning English as a second language are great at interacting directly with guests inside the restaurant,” he said. “But on the phone and with all the noise in the restaurant, an accent becomes problematic.
“Letting the call center handle that lets some of our most dedicated employees work in the front of the house without being challenged, and our customers get better service.”
