Face-to-face Drive-Thru

People may think marketing is all about advertising and surveys. Well, that is not always the case. Marketing is also building a relationship with customers. This is how businesses get loyal customers.

My family and I were about to make an out-of-state trip to my grandparents’ house. We decided to stop by Chick-fil-A’s drive-thru in Arlington, Texas, to order lunch. Of course, a drive-thru is usually where a customer drives his/her car up to the speaker and orders a meal, but this time it was different. We did not order through a speaker, but through a person. I thought that was fantastic. It created a personal relationship between us and an employee. Obviously, Chick-fil-A is focusing on building relationships through a drive-thru. A speaker is such an impersonal device; the customer does not know what the person looks like on the other side of a speaker—it is just an impersonal and sometimes hard-to-understand voice. If an order is complicated, it is hard to explain to the speaker. It creates the bigger chance it will come out wrong. Instead, ordering to a person makes things easier and creates good will. However, not every Chick-fil-A does a face-to-face drive-thru. After we made our order, we drove up to wait in the line for our food. While waiting in line, we drove up to a sauce stand. An employee asked us if we need any sauces such as barbeque or ketchup, and how many do we need.

It was great to see how convenient and easy it was in the drive-thru. Bush’s Chicken in Waco, Texas is another great example of personal relationships. They do face-to-face drive-thru all the time. It was wonderful to get a personal connection from Chick-fil-A!