The road to mobile ordering has had several stops and starts for Dickey’s Barbecue Restaurants Inc., but the fast-casual franchisor says the drive ahead promises smoother operations and incremental sales growth.

Over the past year and a half, the parent of the 383-unit Dickey’s Barbecue Pit chain has rolled out a third-party solution to more than 80 percent of its system in the form of a website optimized for mobile use, www.dickeys.com, said Jeff Gruber, director of communications for the Dallas-based brand.

GOING MOBILE

A guide to mobile payment and ordering for restaurant operators

• Restaurants race to go mobile
• Talking mobile: Tech terms restaurants should know
• 10 questions restaurants should ask before going mobile
• Experiencing Wendy’s mobile app

More than 80 percent of the Dickey’s system now has mobile and online ordering capability via a mobile-optimized website.

“The amount of Internet traffic is now near 30 percent on mobile devices,” Gruber said. “Young professionals are living off their mobile devices now with social media and e-mail, so we needed to be able to allow them to order our food and complete the transactions on their mobile device. You have to make it easy for the customers to get to your food.”

The third-party solution, provided by New York-based OLO, integrates with Dickey’s point-of-sales systems, provides payment transaction security through credit card companies and PayPal, and provides the potential for links to various loyalty and customer relationship management programs, Gruber said.

Dickey’s began testing online ordering platforms in 2008. Those tests failed largely because the technologies didn’t live up to their billing.

“It had to, first of all, be cost effective, because any time you put new technology into the restaurants, you want to make sure the return on investment is there,” Gruber said. “Also, because we are a franchise system, we needed something that was plug and play — easy to implement at a nationwide level.”

The ordering system also had to be adaptable to the variety of POS systems within stores spread across 42 states. Dickey’s was founded in 1941 and began franchising in 1994. The brand’s legacy restaurants had POS and other systems that were far older than those in the newer stores.

Once in place, mobile and online ordering have pushed average checks higher, Gruber said.

“There are more prompts [for Internet orders],” he said. “When you are in the dining room, you are sort of at the mercy of the staff, especially for add-ons. If the customer is rushed in the line and feeling pressured to move through the line, they might not see everything on the menu board. When they are ordering online, they are prompted for sides, drinks, desserts, so the add-ons go up.”

Operators have the ability to control the number of orders they manage so units don’t become overwhelmed, said Noah Glass, founder and chief executive of OLO, which also counts as clients such brands as Cold Stone Creamery, Cousins Subs, Fazoli’s, Five Guys Burgers and Fries, Mooyah, Noodles & Company, and Veggie Grill.

“Think about OpenTable limiting the number of reservations or Fandango limiting the number of seats [at theaters],” he said. “You can set your capacity and provide the customers with an earlier or later pickup option if their first choice is not available.”

Gruber advised operators to run the traps on how flexible third-party systems or even those developed in-house can be to changes in menus and the introduction of limited-time offers.

“You want to consider the nimbleness of the programming,” he said. “The nature of the restaurant industry — with limited-time offers, and even something like if there were suddenly a romaine lettuce shortage and we couldn’t have salads for a week — calls for the ability to respond at a fast pace.”

While Dickey’s executives are pleased with the online-mobile platform, Gruber said, “We have a little more work to do.”

He said the company would like to integrate its catering menu and those customers more fully into the system as well as the brand’s loyalty programs.

And the mobile and online sites, which are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, need to help the stores meet customers’ expectations when the units are closed.

“If you are closed Thanksgiving or Christmas day, you want to be able to turn that on and off,” Gruber said. “You want to deliver the right expectations to that online customer. You aren’t talking to them face to face.”

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless