Taco Cabana had a problem any brand would love, a heavy volume of off-premises orders from its 148 locations. A good problem but a problem nonetheless. It was an issue of synchronization. Fulfilling the wide variety of orders in an appropriate and timely fashion was tricky and frustrating.
Ashley Reed, director of digital and off-premises sales for Taco Cabana
That’s why the brand teamed with DeliverThat, its catering-delivery partner. A conversation ensued between it and Ashley Reed, director of digital and off-premises sales for Taco Cabana.
“We were talking about the issues we were having,” Reed said in an interview. “Our sales managers were spending so much time pulling up every order for the next day and asking, OK, does this need to go with DeliverThat, for the large orders that require a set-up, or can it go with DoorDash or Uber for drop and go? And they were manually assigning orders. It was taking 30 minutes at the end of each day. DeliverThat said, What if we took those orders on for you and worked with you to figure out the best delivery service provider?”
DeliverThat had confidence it could tackle the job as it had developed a tool for just such a challenge.
“We built this orchestration layer to be able to account for deliveries that we couldn’t take,” said Matt Benzel, chief technology officer at DeliverThat, in an interview. “We have a fleet of drivers for certain orders but we don’t handle every delivery. With those we can still provide you solutions and visibility into your whole chain. We have a dashboard that lets you see where all the orders come in from and who they are assigned to. Our goal is to allow merchants to do delivery the way they want.”
Establishing the price threshold for orders
A key decision needed to be made before Taco Cabana flipped the keys to DeliverThat: establishing the price point that would determine the delivery provider, between catering and drop-off. One hundred and fifty dollars had a nice ring to it.
“That seems to be magical price point,” said Reed. “Over that and we can set up a lovely taco bar and give the full service. Under that customers are happy with drop and go.”
The joys of texting
Happy customers mean happy staff. And that certainly has been the outcome so far with this collaboration, which went into effect eight months ago.
“DeliverThat is the only delivery-service provider I know of that has a text feature. In the past if a driver was running late we would have to call the third party and be transferred around, which takes so much time. Our managers are busy manning the drive-thru and answering phones. They don’t have the time to go to the back office and deal with this all day. Now we just send a text to the driver,” Reed said. “It’s been a game-changer for us.”
The bottom line is looking up
All this newfound efficiency is showing up favorably in Taco Cabana’s P&L.
“We’re captured incremental revenue that would have otherwise been lost due to operational inefficiencies,” Reed said. “With the ability to select the most cost-effective provider, we can better control expenses while ensuring reliable delivery. This level of customization helps us optimize our margins.”
The metrics show this. Since enabling the delivery orchestration, Taco Cabana is achieving a 98.8 percent fulfillment rate. Customer complaints are down 20 percent. Its incident rate is down to .48 percent. And it is adding 2 to 3 percent of its delivery fees to its bottom line by avoiding the write-offs it used to take to avoid passing on exorbitant charges to customers.
The stress relief of simplicity
“There are other platforms that follow a similar model where you set parameters and they dispatch out the orders,” said Reed. “What’s different with DeliverThat is it actually handles everything. So if I have an issue, there is one point of contact. A lot of other platforms that we’ve tried did have that automation piece, but we would still have to pull up the dashboard to look and see who delivered the order and reach out to each delivery-service provider. What makes DeliverThat unique is they take all that on for us. It’s set it and forget it. It’s fantastic.”
