Grill’d redefines the “new normal” for QSR payments with Adyen

Discover how Adyen provided Grill'd with a single view of their entire business.

Before the pandemic, Australian gourmet burger chain Grill’d was serving 25,000 dine-in customers daily across 141 restaurants in Australia. As soon as cities went on lockdown in March last year, Grill’d knew that it had to pivot fast and digitally transform to a channel-focused business.

Within a week of the lockdowns, Grill’d was working tirelessly with Adyen to develop a frictionless omnichannel experience for customers. This partnership has driven Grill’d to roll out a unified commerce platform with new payment capabilities, including Apple Pay, Alipay, Amex, and Google Pay. 

“At the start of 2020, we were in talks with Grill'd to enhance the brand's customer experience by optimising their payments strategy. With this in place, Grill'd was able to launch its own delivery service just six days after restaurants were ordered to shut down in March as the pandemic took a turn for the worse,” said Hayley Fisher, Adyen’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand.

A year on, digital transactions have become the new normal for QSR payments, as customers increasingly place their orders across multiple platforms, from websites and apps to third-party delivery services, self-service kiosks, and drive-thru.

Partnerships for payments

The partnership allowed Adyen to provide Grill'd with a single platform that has improved customisation capabilities catering to all forms of payments. Grill’d can also access volumes of actionable customer data and insights via the platform.

Caitlin Caldwell, former Program Manager at Grill’d, said that this has led to a dramatic increase in the volume of traffic and transactions across their chain. Along with launching Grill’d Delivery, Caldwell and her team put all of their rewards, membership programs, and customer engagement services online. 

Grill’d also enables customers to pay via secure credit card and digital wallet tokenisation, which makes the checkout experience much faster. Through the Relish membership program, Grill’d customers can log in via any channel and retrieve their personal details along with their rewards information. 

Grill'd’s omnichannel and unified commerce capabilities in the last year have further strengthened customer relationships by offering more choices, better personalisation, and best-in-class digital experiences.

“I would say it provides for us invaluable sources of data analytics and insights that just really allow the industry to develop more personalised and contextual offerings and experiences for the customers,” Caldwell added.

By introducing Adyen's digital payments platform across all of its stores nationwide, Grill'd was also able to save on operation costs. Staff members are freed up from manual tasks at the counter to focus on those that require creativity and innovation.

Adyen’s platform has provided Grill'd with a single view of their entire business, from customers and orders to payments. Adyen's first mover advantage in Australia is helping its clients unify their channels to create a hassle-free experience for customers that can be accessed from wherever they choose.

Agility in a fast-paced world

Uncertainties brought about by the pandemic have given QSRs a whole new outlook. For Grill’d, one of the main lessons is about quickly adapting to evolving circumstances and customer preferences, even going steps ahead of and beyond customer expectations.

Grill’d has expanded its digital capabilities by offering at-table ordering, where customers simply scan a QR code that brings up the entire experience. Grill’d has also been working with Adyen to bring this functionality natively into their app for eventual roll out over the next months.

QSRs have learned another lesson from their experience with the pandemic. It used to be that customers were either online or offline. Today, the boundaries are blurred and people switch between platforms at random times, all the time.

“It is important to start recognising the customer – their preferences or their location, whether they're online or they're in a restaurant or they're standing in front of you. I think the next phase is going to be about integrating that in-store environment with that online world and kind of giving customers a tailored and personalised experience,” Caldwell added.

With Adyen’s expertise in payment technologies, Grill’d is now more empowered to offer personalisation across channels and be a brand that delivers unparalleled payment experiences to its customers no matter where they are or which channel they are on.