Moe’s Southwest Grill® Launches Mobile Ordering App

Fast-Casual Restaurant Franchise Improves Guest Experience with Mobile Ordering Solution

Atlanta, GA – Apr 18, 2012 – Today Moe’s Southwest Grill announces the launch of a nationwide mobile and online ordering solution in partnership with app design company Splick–it®. Now guests who are accustomed to the freshest, quality ingredients and trademark greeting, “Welcome to Moe’s!”, can bypass the line and get the food they crave faster than ever before.

“This is a great way to keep Moe’s up-to-date in the fast-paced, social media world we live in today. Splick–it provides a tremendous opportunity for us to stay technologically current and give the best customers in the world a more efficient and user-friendly way to pre-order their food,” said Paul Damico, President of Moe’s Southwest Grill.

The app was designed around speed and efficiency. With customer information securely stored, hungry diners can open the app, customize their order, and pre-pay in an average of 60 seconds. Once on location, it’s as easy as walking through the door, bypassing the line, and getting fresh food to go.

In addition to adding iPhone and Android apps to Moe’s mobile presence, Splick–it created fully revamped online ordering websites for each participating location. Moe’s will also have access to new mobile marketing tools created by Splick–it to send targeted, outbound promotions to their user base.

“As an innovative brand in their space, Moe’s was quick to recognize and harness the opportunity presented by the proliferation of recent technological advances in mobility. Their choice to partner with Splick–it is a testament of their commitment to staying ahead of these advances,” said Splick–it Founder, Rob Taylor.

Guests can order from over 440 participating from the new Moe’s mobile ordering app which can be downloaded for free at the iTunes® store or Android Market®. To find a Moe’s Southwest Grill near you, please visit www.moes.com. For more information on Splick–it, please visit www.splickit.com.

About Moe’s Southwest Grill
Moe’s Southwest Grill is a fast-casual restaurant franchise featuring fresh southwest fare in a fun and engaging atmosphere with over 440 locations in 33 states and abroad. At Moe’s, each meal is prepared right before your eyes and is served with free chips and salsa, including the Homewrecker burrito, the Billy Barou nachos, and the Close Talker salad. Founded in 2000, Atlanta-based Moe’s Southwest Grill was ranked #1 in category in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 in 2010 and is a Gold Award winner of the 2008 Consumer’s Choice in Chains Awards. For more information, visit www.moes.com.

About Splick-it
Splick–it brings the restaurant experience into your hand. With brand-specific apps, Splick–it enables you to bypass the line by ordering and paying directly on iPhone, Android, or Web. Restaurants get their own tools and apps to streamline order preparation and better connect with you. Hungry? https://order.splickit.com

“Building a mediocre app is just as bad as selling mediocre product,” says Jason Gurwin in this Harvard Business Review. It is a reflection of your brand. If you are building an app just to get downloads, you are better off not doing anything at all!

With that, here are three tips to keep in mind when building your restaurant app:

1. Keep Customers Coming Back. This one may sound obvious, but too often do companies create apps that function as nothing more than a digital billboard for their brand. Consumers are looking for apps that provide some utility that makes their lives easier or more enjoyable. Thus, restaurant brands need to drive engagement in their apps much like they do inside their place of business; give your customers reasons to keep coming back! What lasting value does the app provide? Remember, a user of your app is no different than a customer in your store. From the moment they open the app, every touchpoint directly reflects on their impression of your brand.

2. Create Brand Evangelists. Smartphones have made it easier than ever for people to communicate with each other. That means it’s also easier than ever for a customer to evangelize your brand. By providing customers with an easy outlet to share their experience with friends and followers (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), you can empower them to become your biggest and best advocates.

3. Collect Data. Imagine if you wanted to increase breakfast orders, and you were considering running a promotion as one method of drawing the attention of your existing customers to this new day part. In this scenario, you would probably prefer not to offer the special to people who were already ordering breakfast on a regular basis. Otherwise, you’d just be providing them with a discounted meal for business you probably would have otherwise received.

By nature, mobile devices contain a wealth of valuable information about the person using it. Apps should be built to capture this data, so it can be utilized to understand, and improve upon, the customer’s experience both in the app and beyond.

One way this data can be utilized outside the app is to tailor marketing efforts to the right people. Brands that utilize this data realize significantly reduced spending through more effective marketing—simply by tailoring future campaigns to the specific people who are most likely to respond. These tailored, or optimized, campaigns will yield markedly better results than a “spray and pray” approach to marketing efforts.

Creating a truly successful app takes a lot of effort, and this is only a taste of what’s needed to accomplish. These three tips should get you on the track to identifying the components that will ultimately add value for your customers and your business.

Starting this month, we’re giving everyone in the Splick–it community a chance to earn some extra line-evading superpower for their eating needs. In exchange for liking our Facebook page, we’ll enter you into a chance to win $50 of Splick–it credit. Plus, you can earn additional entries for each of your friends who enter. We’re picking a new winner each month, so get going!

Enter the Splick–it Stuff Your Face Sweepstakes

As you may have noticed from our previous post,  it really grinds our gears when we see incumbent transaction providers doing it all wrong.   By that same token, though,  we feel the need to call out and give praise to the companies that are innovating, disrupting the status quo, and kicking ass with their consumer and merchant experience.

Square is just such a company.  You may have heard of them by now.  They’ve hit the mobile payment scene like a well-oiled machine. While Square is currently in the process of eating the incumbent POS providers’ figurative lunches, one of our favorite areas of their business is the “Pay with Square” app.

How it Works

The process begins by attaching a method of payment to an account on the Pay with Square app.  Users can then use the app to locate nearby Square-enabled vendors. Pay with Square can be setup to automatically open a “Tab” up when users approach the venue.  The venue is notified via their Square Register app of the user with a Tab and are able to see details about the approaching user.  Users get what they want and pay via Pay with Square when they are done.

Why We Like it

• It’s an innovative integration of a mobile payment system with geo-locative properties.
• The ability of vendors to recognize their customers creates a sense of familiarity and improves the quality of the interaction in real life.
• The app is slick. The interface is clean, well thought-out and responsive
• Square boasts integrated loyalty functionality—saving regulars money and helping business owners increase retention
• Users can use Pay with Square to discover new businesses that are Square-enabled
• The app is fairly ubiquitous—compatible around iOS and most Android devices
• Tabs make for a frictionless transaction experience

More than anything, Square’s new app is a shining example of how we can leverage technology to improve a real world experience.  Once you get past the gimmick value of most apps you may find that they actually add complexity to the intended function.  Pay with Square does the complete opposite, and they do it in style.

Hot on the heels of our Splick–it iOS 3.0 update, we’re proud to announce the release of our updated Android app.  We’ve got a soft spot for the open sourced OS, and we strive to offer consistent experiences across mobile and web devices.  Here’s the lowdown on our latest release:

• Slick Rick- We’ve upgraded the UI of the app for an enhanced look and feel
• Share the Joy- Our Android app now supports social integration on Facebook and Twitter.  Share your activity with your friends!
• How are Doing?-  We love feedback.  We crave it.  And now, you can tell us just how you feel right from the comfort of your phone!  Don’t be afraid to give it to us straight, we promise we’ll appreciate it.

I’m sorry to say that the rate of change in technology and consumer adoption has accelerated to the point that these efforts will result in only marginal returns by the time they are realized at all by the companies that stand to benefit most. Let me rephrase: the rate of change is rapidly accelerating, yet no one will be able to keep up. Therefore, companies must organize cross functional teams in order to be wildly successful in the world of tomorrow, and they must forge strategic partnerships with companies providing relevant services that meet growing consumer demands.

This is precisely the reason why I get upset when I see great restaurant brands choosing their POS providers as their mobile ordering vendor. Brands have a hard time realizing that transaction enablement is not a mobile strategy in and of itself. While transactions are absolutely necessary, they are only a small part of what consumers want in a mobile presence. The fact is that most POS companies are simply not equipped to measure and adapt to consumer needs and habits. POS engineers are masters of big data. They are fantastic at building user interfaces that minimize ordering errors. However, their rigid business model simply doesn’t allow for them to take advantage of the ever-growing and rapidly evolving ecosystem of open platforms.

One could hope that these providers would—at the very least—come up with an awesome mobile ordering platform. But from what’s out there today, they are far too willing to sacrifice an optimized customer experience in exchange for marginal business.

Take a look, for example, at the app for Jazzman’s Cafe & Bakery that was built by an unnamed POS provider. Each page of the app exhibits glaring usability flaws that compromise the user experience.

Let’s start by taking a look at the landing page. The user’s presence on this page inherently implies his or her intent to order just by getting to this point, so why give them three alternatives to finding a location? As a user, I just want to see nearby stores!

And what do you get when you choose nearby stores?

Come on!

Going deeper into the experience, one begins to realize that this “app” does not actually behave like a native iPhone application. The header bar scrolls with the page, the buttons don’t highlight when pressed, the app goes into landscape mode without providing any real value, and the settings area button looks like cardboard cutouts of real iPhone buttons.

In all, it takes a minimum of three screens just to select which kind of tea I want. If I was an actual customer of Jazzman’s Cafe and Bakery, I would have serious reservations about the ability of the person on the other end to correctly translate my order.

As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t surprise me that a POS company produced this kind of low quality consumer experience; They simply don’t have any expertise in the area. I would venture to guess that its development was probably outsourced. As specialists in designing software for employees and managers, they just don’t know how to build a consumer-friendly experience. For that reason, I certainly wouldn’t put their product in the hands of my customers.

Here at Splick–it HQ, we believe in practicing what we preach.  Just as any chef would taste his/her own recipes to ensure its quality, we think it’s equally as important to use our product on a regular basis. It’s that guiding principle that prompted us to start “Drinking our own espresso,” which is our own take on dogfooding. We believe that everyone in the company should interact with the platform on a daily basis. There’s no excuse for any of us to be unfamiliar with our product.

As a company originally born out of a coffee shop, many of us exhibit the predisposition for freshly-roasted beans that one might expect. We drink so much coffee, in fact, that we decided to buy our own espresso machine to feed the addiction. On any given week, the team will go through about 3lbs. of espresso beans. That’s a lot of espresso for the half-dozen or so regulars.

The problem is that coffee-snob grade espresso beans, and the professional grade machine for that matter, aren’t cheap—especially by startup standards. So, after smooth talking our CFO, he agreed to pony up for the machine so long as we each vowed to chip-in a buck per each shot pulled to pay back the cost. Naturally, as a mobile ordering company, we decided to contribute our dollar by “ordering” shots with the Splick–it app.

Within a few minutes, a new location and menu for Splick–it HQ appeared in the app, and the orders have been flowing ever since. But aside from well-caffeinated, hyper-active employees, something else happened that we hadn’t anticipated in the beginning.

What started as a way for the team to pay off the machine has become a staple of our company culture. Not only does the Astra espresso machine make a mean shot, but it serves a dual-function as the office rallying point around which discussions, ideas, and arguments abound. On any given morning, it’s not unusual to find three or four members of the Splick–it team conversing over a round of Americanos.

There are even instances in which orders will be placed without the intention of drinking a cup. For example, our developers will often preemptively order a shot in order to do a final live validation of the system—something that is traditionally very difficult to test in a transaction-based system as our own.

We could have never anticipated the extent to which the espresso machine has become such an invaluable part of our company. Not only has it cultivated numerous conversations that have had a direct impact on our business, but each time we send through an order, it reminds us who we’re doing all of this for: our clients’ customers.

Ah, Saint Patrick’s day: the holiday for the Irishman (or woman) in all of us.

While traditions of the alcoholic nature abound (and you can believe that we will be celebrating in kind), we’ve decided to “Gael” up St. Paddy’s by adding some new traditions of our own:

• Order any item made with Potatoes on St. Paddy’s Day, and you will get a sweet piece of flair when you order through the Splick–it 3.0 iPhone app.

• And to help cure that inevitable burning hangover, orders placed the day after St. Paddy’s day get you 25 bonus Points!

So don’t let your Irish holiday (or hangover) get bogged down by waiting in line for food- Download the app, order and get back to being (temporarily) Irish!

While we here at Splick–it are constantly striving to be the best damn online food ordering platform around, we are equally as interested in utilizing our technology to support the philanthropic efforts of our communities and clients. It was this desire to give back that resulted in our newest feature to be added to the latest version of the Splick–it app for iOS.

How It Works

Version 3.1.2 introduces a new platform feature that gives users of the Splick–it app the option to round-up their mobile orders to nearest dollar and donate the difference to a pre-determined charity—which, in the case of the Splick–it app, is Community Food Share (CFS).

Once a user has enabled donations for his or her account, each subsequent mobile order will automatically be rounded up to the nearest dollar. Users can easily manage their donation preferences at anytime from the MySplick–it panel.

Start Donating Today!

To enable donations, download the free v3.1.2 update from the App Store, launch the Splick–it app, and open the MySplick–it panel by tapping on the icon located in the upper-left hand corner of the app. In the MySplick–it panel, choose Donations. You will then be directed to a mobile-optimized Safari page where you can learn about the efforts of Community Food Share and select your donation preferences.

It’s simple, easy, and provides a sense of hope every time you order. You get your food without waiting in line, and someone in need gets a meal!

Bonus!
As a bonus, we’re awarding users who round-up a mobile order with 50 additional points!

We’ll be tracking our users’ donations throughout the year and will be providing updates on how much has been contributed! Stay tuned!

For more information on CFS, visit: http://www.communityfoodshare.org/

We’d like to extend a special thank you to Heidi McGuire at 9News for putting together a fantastic story.