Burger King — Restaurant in Wichita Falls

I had a chat with someone at BK about my recent experience. It was better than silence, but I really feel for the district manager. That's not enviable a position as it is at this moment.

The last star can only be earned when BKs (parent company) decides to spring for a redundant system for it's app orders.

To the execs who travel a lot, think how frustrating it is to not have a reservation when you have a confirmation for one, and it's already paid for. Now imagine you where out of time to check in or find a room, you would not have a hotel for the next 6 hour event, and you just want a place to store your luggage.

Turn that reservation into a meal for work....that's your customers when there is a problem.

So how do hotels combat this? They all do in various ways, I'll list some of those, hopefully my ramblings will gift a good idea or two for you;

Fax machine. Some hotels have a fax machine that will spit out all new reservations made, with all relevant information, cancelations, etc. Fax is tied to your phone line, the power could be off and as long as you have a backup PSU for your phone line, you will still get reservations...in this case "orders". Orders sent in duplicates are less likely to fail on both channels.

More customer control after placing an order; if my order isn't found....wouldn't it be prudent to allow me, as the customer, to hit "cancel order" still? Provided it hasn't been picked up. Most restaurants do this, this should be common practice. You are not supposed to make my food until I arrive (otherwise it's cold, wasteful even). This would mean, until I pick up my order, even if you take my payment (totally fine), you can't keep my money until you provide a service.

In the instance of a hotel, the service is "holding" or better known as "reserving" a room for you. The hotel would be losing money of they held the room all night, and did not receive payment for it. The room could have been sold, and in more cases than not it would have if the hotel is rated 4 or higher on review outlets.

Managerial access to credit card, order, and payment information at an administrator level, the ability for the person on the ground to hit void for a customer is crucial.

If someone can't find my order immediately, it's handy to have a staff member who can "check the backend". A "backend" is what we in the hotel business use to refer to as the second string for reservation accounting. For a small rundown; you make a reservation through Expedia for the quality inn, your reservation is first paid for, then sent to Expedia. Expedia confirms your inventory with connections to the hotel's "backend", and then confirms the booking and sends a confirmation to the guest, simultaneously the reservations is pushed into the hotel's PMS 2 different ways. One through a dedicated fax or email, and another through the properties PMS directly if the property has one compatible with the OTAs. Backends are just other areas in the system where information needed can be sent, read, received, etc. So you don't have to rely on only one central source. Redundancy goes a long way.

Don't let employees blame your system by making it foolproof. If they blame the system, it won't be used to it's capacity, if it's not...I reckon those are net losses.

If a CRS ("central reservations system"), or in this case "COS", is not employed to some effect, it should be. The managers should have access to the "COS" via a phone call or a computer system. The concept is, all orders stop there first, are confirmed, and then sent to the restaurant. It seems as it stands the order to confirm and send to the restaurant are one in the same. There would also need to be a method of manually entering an order, or pulling the order needed from the COS.

Last one....

I imagine there are thousands of consultants at Burger King. The ones you should listen to on this are going to be customer relations, tech, and more importantly than the consultants, your district manager's, and store manager's. There feedback will...

I was Doordashing and received an order to pick up two deliveries from this Burger King. I arrived on time and stood at the counter to pick up the orders and notice they were fairly busy, not slammed but just a little busy. The lady behind the counter was an older lady with whitish blonde hair. She was visibly frustrated and didn't even greet me until minutes later. When she did greet me she wasn't rude but very dry and unwelcoming. She told me she would get it out to me as soon as they could. While waiting I heard her yell at her employees a few different times, give food to other customers and was very snotty about it and finally I heard her tell one of her employees "When I tell you to make something you don't question me you just make it!". When I finally got my order the polite young lady asked me if I needed a drink carrier and I said yes. There were two drinks for one order and one for another so I needed to be able to differentiate which drinks were for what order. I asked the young lady for a pen so I could write the initials for One customer on the single drink. She went to grab me a pen and this "manager" ask her in a very mean tone "what are you doing?". When the nice young lady replied to her what she was doing the manager told her "you don't need to do that, you need to take that food outside because we have people waiting in the Drive-Thru!". I thanked the young lady for getting the pen for me as I past the line of four customers that had yet to be helped and had been waiting for at least 5 minutes...

I reluctantly stopped in here again on my way home from work and once again they got the simply bacon cheeseburger , no pickle, light on ketchup and light on mustard wrong. It had a lot of ketchup and mustard and it also had mayonnaise. When I took it back in to get a remake I watched the guy put a lot of mustard and a lot of ketchup again and then he put pickle on it. At this point I was really upset, so I just told them to keep the burger and I walked out. So I ended up eating my small order of what was now almost $6.00 cold fries on my way home for my dinner after putting in a 12 hour day at work. 😡 Needless to say that will be my last visit there. This was not the only time my order has been wrong from there andnoteven just the second time. That is why I was so reluctant to stop in again. ALWAYS LISTEN TO YOUR...