How Great Greek Mediterranean Grill used technology to upgrade ordering experience

By Bob Andersen, president, Great Greek Mediterranean Grill

As leading restaurants continue to pivot to enhance the digital customer journey and navigate changes in customer behavior post-pandemic, technology has become a critical strategy for efficiency. At The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, our tech tools have become even more effective since we integrated them in an enterprise system that takes the customer journey to a whole new level.

The name says it all: Nice & Easy. It brings leading-edge technologies together within our business model to improve our speed of service and create labor efficiencies. It's part of our plan to ensure an unparalleled, best-in-class mobile and online customer experience journey for both new and loyal customers. We have just completed the first full year of implementing it after launching in 2021, but so far Nice & Easy has lived up to that promise.

As a franchisor of restaurants, we have three customers: the franchise operator, the frontline team member and the consumer. Nice & Easy gives our operators the tools to execute systems and get useful insights. Frontline members are faster, more efficient and able to work with reduced frustrations. This allows them to focus on taking care of the customer, the most important part of the process.

Building a solution
Nice & Easy was our brand's solution to challenges we were already feeling as a fast-track emerging brand before the pandemic hit. Before, we were a small, emerging brand with a vision to introduce and phase in what we believed to be impactful technology. Our customers' change in behavior as a result of the pandemic required us to speed up this implementation and make it a priority for customer-facing integrations.
The application pulls together technologies we had already been using, from online ordering, pickup and catering fulfilled by third-party vendors to a mobile ordering app and web-based training program for new franchise owners, managers and team members. Nice & Easy has brought a lot of refinements and improvements to those systems.

For instance, it has improved our POS system, so our frontline team members can take orders faster and more easily. Customers place their orders in person, with the mobile app or by phone. Nice & Easy then enables our back-of-house teams to organize and process for maximize accuracy and speed during the most critical times.

Ultimately, our operators benefit from being able to provide a much better team and customer experience – and to realize financial benefits from higher revenue due to brand affinity, efficiency and productivity.
Lessons learned

The speed of technology being introduced in the restaurant space today is unprecedented. Here's what we learned from the development and launch of Nice & Easy, which anyone should bear in mind as they implement new technology:

1. Understand all the costs of the investment. It is critically important to have a clear understanding of the resources required in terms of time, expense and capability. The cost of our investments range from $35 per month to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. Make sure all your teams have clear direction on their part in the project. Integration of technology always creates a big challenge for a smaller organization, and the challenge grows when you're working with separate technology companies. It gets even more complex when the technology will be applied in different areas of your business. Make sure the teams at each integration point have clear direction of their role, dependencies and required outcome.
3. Understand that your needs and the technology's capability will change over time. The decisions that we make today won't necessarily have the same impact tomorrow. Therefore, we need to be nimble and pivot to newer and better technology.
4. Grind in the due diligence.

Everyone has a solution, but not everyone has a solution that will impact your business positively. Prioritize your problems and create a list of solution providers. Assemble an evaluation team that knows your business and can determine functionality impact, IT and security demands, and finance and legal matters. The final step is often missed but very important, asking current users to verify that the promises made by the provider are accurate.
Nice & Easy was a mindset of our long-term vision to approach the evaluation, application and outcomes of applying technology to our brand. We continue to introduce technology that will improve our business and benefit both the restaurant team and the customer.