Alexa, Order Fazoli’s: New Partnership Means Faster, Easier Ordering
For those not familiar with Fazoli’s, I do recommend you try it out. It’s Italian food reduced to its barest elements, and what it lacks in careful attention to detail it makes up for with speed and some really impressive breadsticks. Now, that speed and those breadsticks are about to get that much faster as several Fazoli’s locations now feature Alexa voice-ordering systems.
The arrangement came about as the result of a partnership between Fazoli’s and Orderscape, which could apparently be accomplished for some minor costs and a slight loss of time. Though Fazoli’s, as noted by CEO Carl Howard, doesn’t view voice ordering as a big part of Fazoli’s operations going forward, it may well be a bigger one than anyone expects.
Howard notes that we’re moving toward what he described as an “…on-demand and stay-at-home economy,” which prompted the company to start adding ordering options accordingly to better accommodate those folks.
Orderscape has been branching out for some time now, recently adding Alexa to its repertoire and planning to bring Google Home and Google Assistant on board. It’s part of what Orderscape’s co-founder and CEO Michael L. Atkinson calls “conversational commerce.” It not only drives revenue, Atkinson asserted, but also improves the overall customer experience.
Some here might say that improving the customer experience leads to improved revenue axiomatically, but it may not always be the case. It’s entirely possible, particularly in a market with lots of competition, that a customer experience can be great but the customer never returns because there’s “so much else” out there. Still, both Atkinson and Howard have a point: we’re moving in a direction where this is a thing. It needs, however, to be rounded out; a mobile payment system needs to be part of the ordering process so as to pay for the ordered material, and then, we need the last key component: drone delivery.
Once we can tell Alexa or its equivalent to order us food, have the food be paid for from roughly the same interface, and then have the food brought to our door, then we will truly live in a stay-at-home economy. But this is certainly a big part of the equation.