Ensure the Customer has a Delightful Experience

Overview

Consistency and quality streamline in-store processes, improve front-of-house and back-of-house communication, and increase customer satisfaction.

Consumers will spend over $300bn at quick-service restaurants in 2019. It is a crowded market segment that sees established brands needing to innovate if they are to stay in business.

Consumers across all market segments expect great food and fast service. They want it all with speed, and in some cases, without waiting in line.

Quick service restaurants need to cater to different consumer buying habits. Regardless of the order method, the food needs to be easily ordered, paid for, prepared and delivered, and the user experience must be flawless.

Facing These challenges With Eggplant

Eggplant was selected by a company with over 15,000 locations worldwide.

The goal was ambitious: automate the multi-experience point of sale system used at each restaurant and ensure that the customer has a delightful experience, the menu and ordering in the front-of-house is correct, and the orders are displayed correctly in the back-of-house.

The restaurant chain wanted to expand its mobile and self-serve kiosk capability while maintaining the quality of its drive-thru and cashier ordering systems. They had a repository of 2,500 manual test cases that didn’t cover all the high-risk paths and took too long to execute with the rate of updates put into production. None of the test cases included enhanced mobile ordering capabilities or any of the self-serve kiosks.

To solve this problem, the company used Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) product to create a digital twin of the point of sale process.

The fusion engine in Eggplant DAI used one set of automated scripts to test the cashier, mobile, and self-serve kiosk interface. An integrated device farm used Eggplant’s cloud capabilities that allowed testing against physical mobile devices, self-serve kiosks, and POS systems. Robotics were used to interface with the self-serve kiosks and simulated credit card payments.

Eggplant’s Customer Experience Insights product (CXI) completed the customer feedback loop. Information monitored by Eggplant CXI was used to create new automated tests within Eggplant DAI that replicated customer actions on the mobile and self-serve kiosks down to the last detail.

Amazing Results

The digital twin covering the order to cash process took about 16 hours to map. The total automation time of new scripts took about one week. Eggplant’s software was completely set up and executed automated test cases within three weeks from the initial Eggplant installation.

The quick-service restaurant was able to benchmark their test and performance results, test previously untrodden test cases such as partial payments and gift cards, and were able to see how the customer was interfacing with them and adjust testing priorities accordingly.

The difference in man-hours required to complete a block of work for each regression period decreased from 160 manual testing hours to just 30 automated hours.

Automated test case maintenance has decreased to about 20% of the total effort. New POS, mobile devices, and self-serve kiosk models can now be tested without any new automation.