case study

The Counter Puts Guests in Control of Their Dining Experience with Ready

And added a lunch service – without adding staff

ABOUT

A New Kind of Burger

The Counter offers a fresh, unconventional approach to the typical hamburger restaurant, allowing guests to create their ultimate burger. Choosing from 7 proteins, 12 cheeses, 31 signature toppings, 20 sauces, 6 buns, and 4 fresh greens - guests can create more than a million possible burger combinations, all delivered in a full-service, casual-dining atmosphere.

PROBLEM SPACE

A Fast Crowd

The Counter has multiple locations in some of busiest cities in the US, including Santa Monica, San Jose, Irvine, and Honolulu. With many competitive options available to guests in these locations, The Counter competes on speed, quality and efficiency to ensure that the guest experiences was quick and excellent. In their model, a fast service is harder to achieve because each order is custom-made for the customer. Prior to Ready, this meant the available service window was over an hour - too long for a fast lunch service.

The Counter determined they needed a solution that could speed up the service to attract the lunch crowd. They identified order and payment as an area that could be enhanced with technology by reducing the time it took to order and pay while maintaining a high quality customer experience.

SOLUTION

Ready Implementation

With Ready’s Pay at Table solution, The Counter was able to provide a lunch service that was not previously achievable because service times exceeded the one hour most people have to get in and out for lunch. Reducing that time to 45 minutes opened access not only to another service but more table turns too.

Currently live in 5 locations, we are in a 50+ location rollout to all of their venues, based solely on the success of the product to date and the wide-ranging benefits to operations overall.

RESULTS

Game Changing Time Savings

On average The Counter’s guests that use Ready turn tables 17 minutes faster, with the best performing location recording the most significant time savings with over 21 minutes. Putting the power of self-payment in the hands of guests makes service far more efficient both for the floor staff, and the customer.

Average order value also changes substantially with the use of digital always present menus. Rich imagery, item pairings and the ability for guests to order anytime on their phones means Ready checks are $11 higher than the average non-Ready check.

With the pain points of waiting for a menu or check now removed, guests are now given the connection, customization and control they’ve come to expect from other digital experiences. As a result, they’re also tipping more with Ready tips as much as 12% higher than non-Ready transactions.

The feedback from guests is clear. From over 10K post-payment surveys, guests who used Ready rated their experience close to 5 stars. What this reflects is that the level of service received by Ready users is incredibly high, despite relying less on service staff. A pretty big coup with current labor shortages.

Testimonial

“With Ready we were able to take an over 1hr+ dining experience and reduce it to 45 min resulting in people can actually come in for lunch, growing sales dramatically”

— Santana Row GM, San Jose, CA

About Ready

Ready is the leader of best-in-class contactless dining experiences and the next stage in Restaurant service innovation with friction-busting technologies that transform the guest experience from high-touch to high-quality. We are a company of food lovers whose goal is to make guests say, "Why hasn't it always been like this?"