Wendy’s Store of the Future
When Kevin Vasconi was asked to describe his purview as chief information officer of the fast-food (or quick serve restaurant) behemoth Wendy’s, he said wryly, “If it has a chip in it, I’m pretty much responsible for it.” He then added, “Just about everything has a chip today!” Vasconi also has traditional CIO responsibilities around enterprise systems, office automation, and productivity tools to the company’s store-level systems. Add in responsibilities for Wendy’s e-commerce platforms, which includes our various ways to order and then the data machine that drives everything behind it, and you have a broad set of responsibilities for a CIO.
Vasconi has earned a broad purview as the executive in charge technology and digital through his remarkable experience at Domino’s Pizza. He led a remarkable digital transformation there that helped propel that company to be one of the best performing stocks of the 2010s. So much of the change that he and his team ushered in a better experience for customers, serving them where they wish to be served through the channels they are most comfortable with as opposed to dictating terms to them.
Vasconi has translated a comparable vision to Wendy’s when he joined in October 2020. He notes that digital customer experience and delivery experience both need to operate seamlessly and with excellence. To explain the merging of the two, he offered an example of Wendy’s french fries. They were best experienced hot out of the fryer in a store, and they had a tendency to lose their luster in delivery. “A fresh french fry is a pretty good experience,” noted Vasconi with a trace irony as he understated his case. “They don’t travel well. If you start to take on a significant part of your business to be delivery, you want to have that [in store quality] experience. We changed the recipe on our French fry so that we could deliver a fry that stays hot longer and stays crispy and doesn’t get soggy. While my team was working on the digital experience, we had our culinary team working on [a travel friendly fry]. You bring together a very good digital experience, you bring together a delivery experience, and then you bring together an experience that keeps the food at the quality that people used to get when they went through the drive-through.” He noted that this exemplifies a better, more holistic approach to customers, while also making the case for collaboration across the traditional silos of the company to enhance customer experience.
Wendy’s CIO Kevin Vasconi
The next level of this idea is the development of the store of the future, which Wendy’s refers to as the Global Next Gen design. The new approaches that are in design merge great customer experience with great experience for franchisees (as Wendy’s operates in a franchise model), woven together with excellent technology. In the early stages of the pandemic, when stores were not as busy as usual, food delivery drivers would wait in line in the drive-through along with customers. As customers returned to stores in greater numbers, however, this was identified a potential degradation of customer experience for customers using the drive through. “The new store design has a very specific parking spot,” said Vasconi. “It has a place for the delivery aggregators to go pick up their food. The food’s hot. It is such an improvement in the experience.” The design optimizes for food quality and for speed. After all, the latter has a direct impact on the former.
Franchisees are another kind of customer, of course, and Vasconi takes pride in engaging them, referring to them as among the most innovative resources the company has. “I have a technology advisory council made up of franchisees,” Vasconi said. “I have one here at Wendy’s. I had one at Domino’s. I’ve always had them. They provide extremely useful insight in at least two dimensions if not more. One of them is what business problem should I use technology to solve?” The second dimension is leveraging this constituent group to pilot ideas. “I pilot a ton of technology in franchisees’ stores because their tolerance for things not working is very low,” he underscored. “I think that is very important in the innovation, product development cycle. We use a stage-gate process. We need to know as soon as possible whether what we’re trying to do is going to bear fruit or not and whether we should take it to the next stage. Putting it into production and a franchise store with real consumers coming in gives us almost instantaneous feedback.”
Vasconi will be the first to note that each of these ideas were the result of collaborations from across the company, but woven together, they offer a playbook on how best to think about customer experience in the post-pandemic, digital world. He believes that by bringing together people with marketing, branding and operations together, better and faster innovation can be achieved. “Once those three organizations start to work together and they get into the brainstorming iteration development phase, all of a sudden, the pace of innovation increases dramatically,” he said. “It literally becomes one team, not three separate teams working together. That’s, to me, where the magic occurs. It’s quite difficult for other companies to get that synergy. I don’t know if there’s a magic formula for it. I just know when you see it, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ He sees it vividly at Wendy’s today and plans on continuing to drive better experiences for customers in the process.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.