Make KFC’s Drive Thru experience easy for customers through innovative use of technology
The Drive Thru journey starts from the moment you get behind the wheel
Call the Colonel, a Proof-of-Concept Voice AI ordering experience that lets you order hands free while driving
Innovation
process
Business
discovery
Category audit
Experience
audit
Audience discovery
Customer journey
Ideation workshop
Rapid prototyping
User testing
Proof of Concept
KFC was a new account won by Iris. Iris had sold KFC a set of Innovation Sprints to help drive the KFC experience into the future. I was hired from Ogilvy as the man to lead the charge to help deliver customer-centric innovation. Drive Thru was our first focus area.
The Drive Thru experience as a format had remained the same for nearly half a century but it was now coming under pressure thanks to changing customer expectations, competitor activity, and new technologies alike.
The likes of McDonald’s were fast experimenting with new digital displays and different ways of ordering that also brought the McDonald’s app into the experience. With the Drive Thru lane driving over half of KFC’s revenue, it was critical for KFC to not rest on its laurels but to identify new innovative ways to enhance the customer experience.
We had a loose brief of making the experience easy for the Guests, as KFC refers to its customers, through the innovative use of new technology.
However, as I started in my new role, I soon saw a problem: the process the agency had initially outlined was not going to deliver innovation. Out of a 12-week sprint process just 20% of time was designated on ‘planning and ideation’ and the rest on ‘production and testing’. There was no sign of the customer in the process either.
Where was innovation going to come from in a vacuum – without any human insights and participation from KFC’s Guests in the process? We needed to rapidly re-set the approach and put human insight first, technology second.
The good news was that I had joined the agency at the right time – and the agency’s KFC account leadership team were receptive to my ideas. I showed the problem, used a famous quote by Albert Einstein, and then painted a picture of a more customer- centric process.
We took our KFC client through our thinking. Luckily they also bought into the new approach and we were able to kick off a sprint process that was customer-centric by design.
“Where was innovation going to come from in a vacuum – without any human insights and participation from KFC’s Guests?”
Mapping insights against the Drive Thru journey
After getting started with the usual business, data and stakeholder discovery, it was time to get out into the real world to test some experiences – always the first port of call for forming some hypothesis.
I packed my two kids and my wife in the car and we went off on a mystery shopping tour driving 125 miles visiting a range of Drive Thru experiences in and around the M25.
Armed with a better understanding of the Drive Thru experience and what also other brands were up to, it was time next to get closer to KFC's Guests and Team Members. Myself and a fellow strategist went out to visit different KFC Drive Thru restaurants.
We spoke to Team Members and KFC‘s Guest alike – and observed them as they went through the experience. As our research participants were tucking into their Finger Lickin' KFC in their cars in the parking lot, we chatted about what they thought and felt about the experience.
We made a ton of great observations which led into some very practical quick wins. More importantly, thanks to our in-depth audience discovery, we were able to reframe the problem: we realised the Drive Thru journey starts from the moment you get behind the wheel.
So, instead of focusing all our efforts on enhancing the existing Drive Thru lane, we saw the opportunity to bring KFC into people’s cars using technology. All of a sudden, we were no longer bound by physical space and KFC's bricks and mortar retail estate.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
Part of the team making it happen: Guy, the Software Engineer we brought in to code the AI assistant; Joel, our Creative Technologist; me the Experience Strategist; and Cindy our wonderful Producer
After exploring a whole suite of different experience ideas, we eventually landed on an innovative use of Voice AI. Call the Colonel, as we dubbed our idea, did what it said on the tin: you could call a phone number and go through a Voice guided decision-making tree to place your order.
We rapidly prototyped and road-tested the experience with KFC‘s Guests and Team Members alike. We got a set of KFC customers to drive up and down Old Kent Road in London and got them to test how it felt calling a phone number to place their order – hands-free of course. We recorded their experiences on a GoPro.
As our Guests in our user testing group pulled out onto the local KFC car park by Old Kent Road and had their order delivered to them, we spoke to them to find out what they thought and felt about the experience. We used feedback to iterate the experience and make it better to the point where we could say we had a customer validated Proof of Concept experience.
“We rapidly prototyped and road-tested the experience with KFC‘s Guests and Team Members alike.”
A frame from our customer experience film
Call the Colonel was a win in more ways than one: the AI assistant took away the cognitive load of taking orders, releasing drive-thru staff to focus on customer service. It also bypassed customer pain points of the conventional Drive Thru experience: inability to access the menu early on, long queues and comprehension issues at the speaker-post.
The experience wasn't just easy – it was also fun and novel. There was an entertaining element to the experience; we could see based on our audience trials that Call the Colonel had the potential to become a real signature experience for KFC. It was as if you were able to talk to the Colonel Sanders, KFC's famous founder, himself.
We had successfully created a Proof of Concept experience – but also a Proof of Concept of a new lean and agile customer centric sprint process that could be deployed in future KFC innovation sprints.
The work went down like a storm both at KFC and Iris becoming one of the foundational customer experience case studies used by Iris to date.
In many ways Call the Colonel was ahead of its time. Back then KFC was in the process of still trying to get its delivery and Click & Collect operations working through the KFC app. But with the latest developments in AI Call the Colonel could be back on the agenda again soon.
Our Proof of Concept provides a unique example of how KFC could bring its brand personality to life in new innovative ways. Just imagine ordering your bucket from Colonel Sanders himself...it's a finger lickin' great idea!
“One has to remember that every failure can be a stepping stone to something better.”
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