One rule dominates the food service industry: keep your customers happy. This rule goes beyond simply providing high-quality cuisine—modern consumers expect to be able to contact and order from your restaurants without issue.
Donatos, a family-owned chain of pizza restaurants founded in Columbus, OH, understood this food industry rule. The company operates more than 200 locations in nine states and is still growing. Of these stores, 105 are company-owned, with more than 100 others operated by franchise partners. As part of its goal of steady, sustained growth, the Donatos corporation sought to double its customer service efforts, meaning an upgrade to its IT and telecom platform was in order.
The main priorities for this upgrade included systems to enable unrivaled customer satisfaction, enhanced security measures, and a comprehensive process to streamline the complex ordering system that Donatos had relied on for years. Each method of placing an order, whether over the phone, on the website, or via mobile app, was crucial to the customer experience and needed to be updated and empowered accordingly.
For Donatos, dropped or disconnected calls, online and mobile orders that fail to go through, or even poor reception, can all translate to lost revenue, so strong and reliable connections were of paramount importance. Additionally, high-traffic periods such as holidays or major sporting events meant that individual restaurants could easily be overwhelmed by calls and orders.
Parallel Technologies, trusted advisor to Donatos, partnered with CBTS to provide a unified, cloud-based commercial platform that met the challenges that Donatos was facing. This solution would utilize an SD-WAN architecture to keep commerce applications and systems up to date through the use of several cost-effective internet transports, creating redundancy that ensures applications would remain supported in case the primary circuit failed for any reason. The increased reliability of this system would bode well for the company’s goal of delivering the best customer experience possible.
A cloud-based call queuing system was implemented to alleviate the difficulties of dealing with above-average call volume. This solution ensured that if a customer called to place an order during a period of peak activity, they would be placed on hold with a branded, automated message encouraging them to stay on the line.
Another point of improvement that the CBTS/Parallel Technologies partnership looked to address was the in-store guest Wi-Fi, which lacked consistency across retail locations. In order to provide a uniformly satisfying customer experience, each restaurant was outfitted with a new guest Wi-Fi environment complete with branded login pages and secure browsing measures to keep guest data safe.
Security was also a primary concern for Donatos corporate, which sought to protect its newly modernized and cloud-empowered restaurants from any potential intrusions. CBTS and Parallel worked in tandem to install a Unified Threat Management (UTM) platform in each location, granting total application control, web filtering and safe search tools, and much more at the store level.
When Donatos was in need of a truly modern network overhaul to continue serving its customers with exceptional quality, CBTS and Parallel answered the call. The proven performance of CBTS Hosted Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), SD-WAN, and telecom solutions, combined with Parallel’s extensive design overlay expertise, formed and implemented a personalized and comprehensive upgrade strategy suited for the entirety of the Donatos corporate structure.
Contact us for more information on how CBTS and Parallel Technologies can create a comprehensive, cloud-enabled networking solution for your organization.