How do you make your fast-food restaurant choices?
Do you choose the one that is closest to where you are at the time? The one with a specific menu item? Lowest prices? Fastest service? The one with a specific toy promotion or playland for the kids?
With so many decisions to make when it comes to your fast-food experience, you should be happy that you’re not alone in having frustration in finding the Perfect Fast Food Restaurant in your travels.
Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food
And that’s why QSR Magazine has come through with their DRIVE-THRU BENCHMARKS and ranked the major fast-food restaurants on how well they serve their customers. Why is the drive-thru so important? Because anywhere from 50-70% of a location’s sales gets passed through that tiny, gas-fumed window.
So yeah, the drive-thru is a pretty important part of the fast-food restaurant industry. The restaurants reviewed included the six major standbys: McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A, Wendy’s, Burger King, Krystal, and Taco Bell. Then, as QSR has done every year they’ve done the survey, they’ve included one regional restaurant for variety — in 2012, they chose Bojangles.
The benchmarks that QSR ranked are fairly standard examples of what the average consumer would consider important in their fast-food experience. While QSR included a few additional benchmarks in their report (click the link to read more), here are some that we thought most Web Watch readers would be interested in first:
- Average Service Time – Wendy’s came out on top with the fastest service time. Worst was Burger King. (Web Watch doesn’t need a QSR survey to tell us how slow Burger King can be at their drive-thru compared to other fast-food restaurants we frequent.)
- Order Accuracy – Chick-Fil-A had the highest accuracy, at 97.3%. Burger King came in last again, with an order accuracy of 83%.
- Favorable Exterior – while all those surveyed seem to take pride in their outward appearance, Taco Bell bested them all with a 99.7% favorable rating. That last-place McDonald’s was last with a 98.3% rating should give you an idea of how close everyone was.
- Visibility of Dumpsters – Not everyone wants to see a dumpster as they drive around the building to get their food. Bojangles needs to step up their game, as 94.2% of those surveyed had visible dumpsters. For once, Burger King comes out on top with dumpsters visible only 66.4% of the time.
- Customer Service – Let’s look at the positives and negatives. Chick-Fil-A was deemed most pleasant, with 57.4% ranking as “Very Friendly” and only 0.7% ranking as “Rude”. Web Watch feels bad busting on Burger King again, but they only had 27.4% ranked as “Very Friendly”, and a whopping (no pun intended) 2.8% perceived as being “Rude”.
- and the every popular butt of many jokes, Speaker Clarity – The best drive thru speaker was at Taco Bell, with 98.4% of their speaker equipment coming through loud and clear. Krystal’s equipment needs a little work, at 86.2%
So what do you look for in a quality drive-thru, aside from speed of service? Have you ever gotten screwed over by bad order management? Let us know in the comments below….