Quick service restaurants (QSR) need to focus on three things to capture and retain customer loyalty: Food, staff, and atmosphere.
A new InMoment consumer report titled, Positive Identification of Top QSR Characteristics, doesn’t rank QSR brands, but rather identifies trends, drivers, and insights to help all QSR brands understand the areas where they should be focusing to better satisfy guests, fulfill their brand promise, and gain sustained success.
When studying top QSR brands, the InMoment Consumer Insights Panel found that the key drivers for success were: Food Satisfaction, Staff Satisfaction, Speed of Service, Menu Selection, Atmosphere Satisfaction, and Order Accuracy.
Here are the top three drivers for leading QSR brands, according to the report:
1. Food
You can write this one down in permanent marker. We’d even go so far as to say it’s safe to tattoo it along your knuckles, because this one isn’t changing in your lifetime. Food is the primary reason your restaurant exists. It’s no surprise that it’s the first thing you need to get right, and the thing your guests value the most.
The correlation between food satisfaction scores and a brand’s % Delighted ranking was too strong to ignore. And yet, the data tells us there are other forces at play. It turns out that food alone is not always enough
2. Staff
Your staff exercises a lot of influence on the guest experience. The more staff interacts with guests in your restaurant, the more impact they have on satisfaction levels and business results. When gauging guests’ satisfaction with the staff they dealt with, this principally measures interaction, intensive attributes, and behaviors like friendliness and attentiveness.
3. Atmosphere
Atmosphere is a Top 3 driver, but it’s not quite in the same rarified air as Food and Staff, which is actually part of what makes it so important: It represents an emerging opportunity of differentiation for QSR brands.
Nearly half of all brands studied found themselves in the crowded middle of the pack with a % Delighted score between 40% and 50%. Meanwhile, only three brands scored higher than 60% in %D—and one solitary brand scored above 70%, the study notes.
On a global scale, this “size vs. satisfaction” phenomenon starts showing up significantly at the 3,000-location mark. Nine brands in the study currently operate between 3,000 and 9,999 locations globally. Of those nine brands, only three rated in the top half of QSR brands.
One trend that was hard to ignore was the conspicuously inverse relationship between a brand’s size (# of locations) and its %D rating.
The explanations for this phenomenon are many, and, because they overlap and complement each other, it’s impossible to assign just one cause. Of the seven giant brands in our study, only one (Pizza Hut) rated above the midline.
“There are many different reasons guests visit restaurants at the different times and rates they do; if you can figure out the overriding reasons for most visits (especially the satisfying ones), you’ll be able to stand out and succeed on a level that generates loyalty and promotes longevity,” the study says. “Within the key drivers we covered in this report, always look deeper for brand-specific application and the key sub-drivers at play.”