Craveable Brands, the franchisor for Red Rooster, Oporto, Chicken Treat and Chargrill Charlie’s, sees AI as potentially valuable for customer loyalty and franchisee assistance applications, but has set a high bar for how it will deploy the technology.
Craveable Brands CIO Simon Revelman
Chief information officer Simon Revelman told the Agentforce World Tour Sydney that AI agents represent “obvious” uses for artificial intelligence technology in hospitality settings.
These, said Revelman, could be end customer-facing; if the customer’s chips are cold, “the agents can then very quickly spin up a voucher [and] send them the offer. It keeps the customer happy and retains them.”
Meanwhile, Revelman predicted that AI agents could also provide assistance to franchisees, enabling them to pose questions such as ‘How many hours a week can a 15-year-old work?’ or ‘How long can I keep chicken in the Bain-Marie?’
“It allows answers [to be found] without digging around a document library,” he said.
While AI is promising, Revelman indicated that the company wanted to de-risk its adoption of the technology and would look to its technology vendors to do that.
“We want to be able to trust our vendor suppliers to deliver,” he said.
“We’re looking for experience – been there, done that – to build that credibility. And I think in this journey to AI that we’re doing, there’s now an opportunity for all of us to get vendors to have to put their skin in the game for a new application that they want to promote or sell to us.
“There’s not a lot of positive use cases out in the market. We saw a stat that 95 percent [of AI projects fail]; only five percent are working out.
“So, we want partners who are prepared to put their money where their mouth is and prove out an ROI in production before we have to pay for it.
“What it means is if they do a good job, we become their reference, so they’re able to go and sell that to everyone else.”
Data-driven franchisees
Craveable Brands uses Salesforce to help franchisees manage their businesses and for self-serve assistance.
The company uses Experience Cloud, specifically Community Portals powered by Service Cloud, to connect franchisees to information, suppliers and other forms of assistance.
“We took a lot of disparate systems over [a] period of time and brought that together into Service Cloud,” Revelman said.
“The franchisee has an account with all their data in it – leasing documents, their legal documents, their pricing, their fees for marketing and IT and that sort of thing, all in the one spot.
“They’re able to go in and log a broken fryer or to change their opening hours. We then integrate [Salesforce] into other systems, so the workflow kicks on.”
That integration ensures, for example, that updates to opening hours are pushed through to Google, Uber, Doordash and other web-based platforms.
“That makes sure we don’t make mistakes by leaving out Google My Business for opening hours, and a customer turns up and is disappointed because the shop’s not open,” Revelman said.
The system also connected franchisees to suppliers and head office staff could monitor the progress of tickets to ensure supplier service level agreements (SLAs) are met.
“[For example, if a franchisee] get a batch of chicken in that is the wrong size, they can go into Service Cloud, put their ticket in, that goes through to the supplier then to be dealt with, and our supply chain team is monitoring the SLAs of the supplier to make sure they’re getting back to our customer – the franchisee – quickly enough so we’re holding them to account.
“By putting it all together and having those SLAs in place and the oversight, we’re able to make sure that we’re successful.”
The franchisor also puts data to use to help a team of business consultants find ways for franchisees to improve their operations and revenue.
It runs Tableau over a Google Cloud-based data warehouse, which is used by “our business consultants who coach those franchisees to have all the metrics ready at hand to be able to point out where there’s room for improvement and where they’re doing well so they can focus their attention in the right area and get up to a successful level.”
Revelman said that the company’s IT investments, particularly around enabling data-driven optimisation, is important given the nature of the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry.
“We’re definitely facing a softer market,” he said.
“We’ve got customers coming in less frequently and spending less each time.
“There’s also more competition in the market than ever before, and chicken is under assault. We’ve got McDonalds and Hungry Jack’s with chicken, so we’re getting attacked from all sides.
“So, for us it’s about how we support our franchisees to continue to operate in this sort of market.”
Introducing new menu options and setting a high standard for staff training are two ways the company is trying to differentiate; being more data-driven is a third.
“[We want to] make sure that the franchisee has all the correct data at their fingertips to look at sales, labour, inventory, wastage, that sort of thing, so they can make decisions very quickly and be as efficient as possible.”
Ry Crozier attended Agentforce World Tour Sydney as a guest of Salesforce.
