Chipotle Smooths out its Order Pickup Schedules

Mobile ordering is part of the landscape in restaurants, thanks to increasing smartphone use in general and more mobile payments options in particular. This is prompting plenty of change throughout the fast food and fast casual dining industries, and beleaguered Chipotle is no different here. In fact, Chipotle has recently augmented its mobile app with the new Smarter Pickup Times system, which should provide new levels of capability in mobile ordering.

Smarter Pickup Times is set to work with both Android and iOS, as well as Web-based options, by letting users not only schedule orders in advance, but set up a pickup time for those orders in advance. Based on the current order volume, the system then routes an estimated wait time back to the customer, which gives the customer a better idea of when to make the pickup.

Early tests offered welcome results; wait times were down around 50 percent, and digital orders were on the rise as well. Nothing succeeds quite like success, and when something works, people want to use it.

Admittedly, mobile ordering is still something of a novelty; just under a third of customers in North America used this system to place orders for food in the last three months. The upshot there is that it means there’s a lot of room to bring new users into the fold.

It’s worth pointing out that Chipotle is doing this right by most every standard; this is a company trying to recover from some significant loss of face in recent months, and it’s adding to its systems and making things more efficient. Customers are responding accordingly, and that’s good news overall. Chipotle may have even picked up on the lesson that Starbucks is learning about having too many orders in the system overall to meet with the current staff, and is trying to spread those orders out over a wider span to better ensure they’re met.

Chipotle’s recovery has been coming along rather nicely, thanks to a combination of big changes and gradual efforts to earn back trust. A system like this certainly can’t hurt things, and it may be that this is just what Chipotle needed to get back on customers’ menus.