Why customer experience should lead QSR decisions

One broken channel is all it takes to lose a customer for good.

The quick-service brands winning on customer experience are the ones treating their technology as the last decision, not the first. That's how Jeff Miller, Chief Experience Officer for Coates in North America, sees the divide emerging across the industry. Brands that start with customer outcomes build technology around the experience. Brands that start with technology often end up bolting systems onto an experience they were never designed to support.

"The ones that are struggling the most are the ones that are thinking about the technology first and thinking about it almost as an add-on to the experience," Miller said. That philosophy creates what he describes as fragmented technology: systems added piece by piece rather than designed around a seamless guest journey.

Recent Coates research found that 27% of customers prefer to order through self-service kiosks, 32% through the drive-thru, and 30% via mobile, meaning the front counter now accounts for just 11% of orders. When any one of those channels breaks down, the cost is not just operational.

"You rack up a couple of brand failures at a single restaurant, all of a sudden it gets exploded and amplified. Then you got a loyalty challenge," Miller said. He pointed out that isolated failures such as a crew giving the wrong order could compound into a wider loyalty problem.

55% of consumers said they would stop buying from a company after several bad experiences, and 32% said inconsistent experiences alone were enough to make them leave, according to a PwC Customer Loyalty Survey published in March last year. Meanwhile, a separate report by Qualtrics XM Institute puts a dollar figure on that attrition: poor customer experiences could cost businesses nearly US$3t in lost sales globally.

The fix starts with reframing what digital infrastructure actually is. Treated as back-office plumbing, it stays siloed and disconnected from the guest.

"You've got fragmented tech, and fragmented tech is fragmented data," he said. When every ordering channel operates in isolation, so does the data. Without connected data, brands struggle to understand customer behaviour, identify pain points, and continuously improve both operations and the customer experience.

He points to how mobile and e-commerce evolved over the past 10 to 15 years, measuring every step of the journey and pinpointing where customers hit friction, as the standard physical restaurants are now being held to.

What is less visible, but equally damaging, is what fragmentation does to the crew. Staff arrive in an already complex environment, expected to run multiple tasks at once.

"If the tech and the equipment aren't helping them do their jobs and all of a sudden it breaks down, it's just a lot of stress," Miller said. That stress drives attrition. Staff quit more often, hiring becomes harder, and the gap between what the brand promises and what the crew can actually deliver keeps widening. The crew, as Miller puts it, are the ones softening the corners around technology that doesn't quite work.

It is in that gap that Miller argues the industry's relationship with AI will either pay off or fall apart. The brands getting it right think about AI in terms of anticipation and augmentation, using it to remove friction and surface the right information at the right moment. The ones getting it wrong use it mainly to strip out labour.

"You've replaced labour. All of a sudden, I've got question fatigue. I may be getting a slightly higher check on upsell rate, but maybe my customer satisfaction scores are starting to go down," he said.

The clearest example is the drive-thru. Voice AI alone, Miller argues, creates cognitive overload: a customer faces questions with no visual reference, deciding under pressure. Pair voice AI with a visual layer and the dynamic shifts. The system confirms the order and reduces back-and-forth, freeing the crew member at the window to focus on the human moment rather than managing the fallout.

"All of a sudden, the crew has gone from an order taker to an experience maker," Miller said.

That shift is what excites him most about AI, and it is also where the customer-experience argument comes full circle.

Done well, he said, AI can separate the noise from the action, organising the flood of data so a crew member knows where to actually go and act, then get back to the interaction. Done well, technology stops competing for their attention and blends into the background, letting crew return to the human connection that defines hospitality.

“High tech equals high people, which I think really drives the point of hospitality,” Miller said.

For Miller, that's the real promise of AI. Not replacing people but giving them the tools to spend less time wrestling with technology and more time delivering hospitality.

Brands that still treat digital infrastructure as a back-office investment are missing the point. Technology isn't separate from the customer experience, it enables it. And those that fail to make that connection risk under-investing not just in technology, but in their ability to learn, adapt and compete.