Client background

Restaurant Technologies (RT) is a privately held leading foodservice supply company and provider of innovative cooking- oil management and distribution services to more than 25,000 national quick-serve and full- service restaurant chains, independent operators, grocery delis, hotels, casinos, universities and hospitals.

The business challenge

RT was looking for help in creating customer experiences that could grow with the company. Scalability was an important underlying requirement to meet the following business challenges:

• Reactive customer service: RT experienced rapid growth over the past decade. Longtime customers expressed they were not seeing the same personalized, proactive service they were used to when they first became a customer
• Oil outages: RT’s proprietary oil tanks monitor oil inventory and automatically trigger a delivery. However, customers were experiencing intermittent oil outages
• Unclear information: Even with RT’s dynamic routing system, RT’s customer call center was unable to give customers a firm ETA of when to expect their next oil delivery or service visit, which made it difficult for customers to plan their operations
• Account information: RT had an online account information portal but customer adoption rates were low. With rare access to a desktop computer, restaurant managers were missing critical account information

Strategy and solution

With a proven customer experience innovation methodology that is rooted in design thinking, Baker Tilly was engaged to work with RT to complete the following:

• Current state analysis: Conducted extensive primary research, one-on-one interviews with staff members, listening sessions with customers and in-person observations during oil deliveries and service calls to understand customers’ attitudes and expectations
• Current state journey map: Placed results from the current state analysis phase into a journey map—a visual depiction of all the customer touch points throughout the relationship with RT
• Innovation workshop: Conducted an innovation workshop with a large cross-functional team and from a customer’s point of view, they designed a dozen proposed new experiences to address customers’ expectations
• Customer focus groups: Invited customers to focus groups to gauge their reactions to the proposed new experiences. Asked for ideas to improve the experiences even further
• Kano Model survey: Gathered quantitative feedback using a wide-audience survey asking customers about the proposed new experiences and added quantitative market research questions to understand customers’ attitudes
• Project charters: Led the team through the drafting of project charters, which were used to guide the implementation

The RT team selected the clear experience ‘winners’ in the eyes of customers to move forward with and now has a robust and validated pipeline of customer experience improvement initiatives. They designed new experiences to address each business challenge - reactive customer service, oil outages, unclear information and account information. RT secured funding for these initiatives and defined project teams for implementation.