OBJECTIVE

Although drive-thrus account for such a large proportion of sales, it’s an area that can cause the most frustration for customers and employees alike.

Employees deal with orders from multiple lanes, process payments, scan loyalty cards, and pack food. Mobile ordering apps and self-service kiosks add to the chaos and frustration. For many workers, the multitude of tasks compared to their salary level is not worth the stress. And of course, the longer the wait times, the long queues and the more frustrated customers become. So providing a quicker and more accurate service could be the difference between a restaurant’s growth or stagnation. Voice-based AI technology delivering human-level customer service will forever change the way drive-thrus operate.

APPROACH

The client provided us with different data sets. We used voice-based technology to build a kiosk that can deliver human-level customer service. This AI-based kiosk will also offer personalized coupons to customers, encouraging customers to return to the restaurant with another order in mind. We also used sentiment analysis which can assist voice assistants in detecting customers’ emotions from the tone of their voice and responding appropriately. Powered in part by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and automated speech technology (ASR), our AI-based kiosk could also recognize text and speech to mimic natural human conversation when taking food and beverage orders. Also, with the help of machine learning, we made an ML-based decision technology to predict what menu offerings are most likely to drive sales in its drive-thru business. During the development, we made it a point to make the kiosk a one-stop solution for all. The final kiosk was a multilingual, multi-accent, multi-item conversational ordering system.

This technology also updates the digital drive-thru menu displays based on:

• The time of day
• Current order selections
• Current restaurant traffic
• The popularity of menu items
•  Weather conditions