The last time the server went down was the last straw for Brian Loescher, president of Golden Chick Franchising, the QSR with 230 locations.
“The server we were using was not cloud-based and when it crashed you had to package it up and mail it to the service department and wait for it to come back, which took seven to 10 days,” he said in an interview. “In that time you’re not processing credit cards. When you get the server back you run all these charges and people call and complain and say, Hey, I didn’t go to Golden Chick yesterday. I haven’t been in more than a week. They decline the charges. It’s a money loser. We just couldn’t do it anymore.”
And that wasn’t the only issue. The former system was also clunky in how it integrated with other platforms and it didn’t play well with new technologies. It was becoming the dude at the party telling the same story too many times. It had to go.
Brian Loescher, president of Golden Chick Franchising
Loescher and his team spent a year auditing the brand’s POS needs in relation to reporting, accounting, and operations. Like nearly every restaurant, it emerged from the pandemic a different brand. Where it used to have about half of its revenues come from in-store, today that’s down to 10 to 15 percent, with 60 to 70 percent coming through the drive-thru and 15 to 20 percent from delivery. He wanted a platform that could integrate with all the brand’s functions and inputs, including tablets and kiosks, and would be easy for staff to operate without much outside support. He landed on Qu.
“What we like about Qu is it just wants to be a POS for fast-food and quick-casual restaurants,” Loescher said. “It doesn’t work with movie theaters. It doesn’t work with bars. It works with restaurants. It offered to train all of our people, it was open to integrations with our vendors, and its APIs were user-friendly.”
The relationship felt right to Qu as well.
“Golden Chick is our ultimate customer,” said Amir Hudda, CEO of Qu. “Brian is attuned to what his brand needs. We spoke about the complexities of a kitchen and a drive-thru and how we can handle everything with our unified commerce platform.”
Qu made sense to Loescher for many reasons. But what may have sealed the deal was Qu’s Janus-faced kiosk.
“You can press a couple buttons and turn it around and use it as a regular terminal. It can be customer-facing or kiosk-facing. You can use it as a regular terminal during your rush or make it customer-facing during non-peak hours. We didn’t see that with other platforms. It was a big selling point for us,” he said.
Since the initial trial in the first quarter, more than half of Golden Chick’s locations are now plugged in with Qu. And the early returns are positive. Employee training times have decreased, integrations with partners have gone smoothly, and drive-thru times are getting faster, which for Golden Chick is massive. The enhanced functionality is also allowing the brand to do more with its loyalty program, mobile app experience, and dynamic menu boards. It’s even starting to experiment with drive-thru AI.
“So many times I’d see a customer go through a drive-thru and it’d be slow-moving because a cashier can only go through one screen at a time. With Qu, once customers start the order, if they miss some blanks, they can just fill them in later. They won’t be totaled out until they fill them all in. If a customer says I want two combos, one with this, one with that, you can do all that on one screen without making the customer hear, ‘Wait, back up. What sauce with that one?’ Or, ‘Wait, back up. What drink with this one?’ With Qu, it’s faster and it leads to a better guest experience because customers are not getting cut off and interrupted when ordering the same things they’ve ordered for the last year,” he said.
He considers the tech upgrade a crucial element in the brand’s growth strategy. “We’re planning to add stores between now and the end of the year,” he said, “and we’re hoping to expand next year into Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, and Nevada.”
Loescher is expecting to see the tech adopted in every store now that he has persuasive data to share.
“It’s a relief because I didn’t want to ask franchisees to invest in new technology unless we can show efficiencies and gains,” he said. “And now we can.”
