Restaurant IT Support: Transforming User Experience

Client Profile

Our hospitality client is a leading developer of global, multi-channel food service brands, delivering 100+ products and $1B+ in annual retail sales. Founded in 2004, the private equity-backed corporation franchises and operates 6,400+ restaurants, cafes, ice cream shops, and bakeries in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and 55+ foreign countries.

Effective IT support for internal resources is crucial for the success of any business today. The IT service desk plays a strategic role in aligning IT and business processes, ensuring all IT infrastructure runs smoothly. This becomes even more critical for businesses operating in the challenging and dynamic food service industry, where the smooth and seamless functioning of back-office technology as well as customer-facing interfaces is integral to providing consistent guest experiences across all destinations.

Our hospitality client was seeking a new partner to provide restaurant IT support and Point-of-Sale (POS) Administration capabilities for all their 4000+ locations in the U.S. via multiple channels. The client had run into challenges with their existing managed services provider, who did not meet their business requirements and did not provide the client experience they expected for their brands. Their requirements and challenges included:

• Improved IT support for their franchise store locations, including more empathetic agents possessing soft skills and better English.
• Reducing the number of support tickets over time. Also, their existing IT support partner was not focused on providing analysis on trends or setting up true problem management processes to address repetitive issues and eliminate them.
• First Contact Resolution was too low due to lack of knowledge and troubleshooting skills. For the same reasons, most of the tickets were assigned to the client’s internal support team instead of being resolved by the provider.
• Their ticket handling process was manual, with no automation or implementation of self-service portal, chatbots or any other initiatives that would modernize the existing support structure.
• The provider’s documented processes were not accurate, developed, or maintained properly.
• There was no dedicated training program in place for bringing new IT Agents or POS Administrators into production.
• The provider did not offer POS Administration support services, which the client needed, to complement the IT Service Desk.
• End user support for IT service desk was only available in English which was a pain point for Spanish-speaking restaurant franchisees.
• The client was also incurring a higher cost of operations due to the need to keep internal resources involved in processes such as ticket resolution.

The client had already been working with Auxis for improving their franchised store support. We created a pioneering digital audit and coaching program for the client’s franchisees across their 6,600+ locations, which transformed their store audits and created significant savings and efficiencies. Following the impressive results from that engagement and the client’s positive experience working with us, they decided to extend the partnership with Auxis to provide IT support for their U.S. locations.

Auxis put together a team of skilled IT support agents for different levels, POS administration analysts, and a management team to oversee and manage the operations. We took a multi-pronged approach to create a comprehensive IT support solution for the client.

Nearshore Support Team

We leveraged our highly skilled nearshore resources in Costa Rica and Colombia to build a strong restaurant IT support team for improving user experience. Auxis’ nearshore team provided the following advantages:

• Strong cultural affinity with the US and availability in the same time zone.
• Superior English skills, with the most neutral accent in the region. We also added Spanish language support to the program, which was not provided by the client’s previous service partner.
• Strong customer service skills, which allowed agents to handle client issues with empathy and efficiency.
• Lower cost of operations due to labor arbitrage.

Continuous Improvement Program

Auxis’ Center of Excellence (CoE) played a key role in supporting and improving operations through Quality Assurance (QA), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Knowledge Management (Process documentation), Training, and Workforce Management processes.

We put in place a Continuous Improvement initiative using structured QA and CSAT programs to understand how agents are doing, what customers sentiment is, and use this information to re-train or coach agents, educate customers, and improve processes in general.

Performance Management Program

We also implemented Performance Management monitoring and reporting from Auxis Business Intelligence tools, to ensure all incidents are addressed as needed, agents are performing at the desired levels, and recurring trends are tracked and analyzed over time.