Authors:
Jessica Snead, Susan Brosnan, Daniel Goins, Patricia Hogan
Abstract:
A method is proposed to allow a restaurant and the customer to be able to quickly determine at a glance whether or not an order has been fully fulfilled. At a restaurant with online ordering capabilities, each order receives a graphical identifier which can be used to track the order fulfillment. This graphical identifier can uniquely identify the order at a glance, without having to identify the customer's name or order number.
Background:
When ordering takeout from a restaurant, customers often fail to receive all items in their order. This happens because restaurant employees are in a hurry and have multiple people working on each order, and because customers do not always take the time to look through all their bags and containers before leaving. This results in poor customer satisfaction since the customer must decide whether to bother returning to restaurant for the missing item(s).
Description:
This solution allows the restaurant and the customer to be able to quickly determine at a glance whether or not an order has been fully fulfilled. At a restaurant with online ordering capabilities, each order receives a graphical identifier which can be used to track the order fulfillment. This graphical identifier could be a group of or single avatar, cartoon character, letter, icon, etc. that can uniquely identify the order at a glance, without having to identify the customer's name or order number.
Flow:
- Customer places an order online
- Restaurant receives the order and replies with an order confirmation message. This order confirmation message returns an easily recognizable graphical identifier so the customer and order fulfillment team will both know what to look for.
- When the order is packaged, the bags containing each order are labeled with this order indicator. (Could be stickers, invisible ink, printed on demand, etc.)
- When the employee packs the order, they use the graphical identifier to verify the number of bag and/or contents.
- When the customer picks up the order, they use the graphical identifier to verify the bags and/or contents.
There are several possible ways to implement the graphical identifier:
- Invisible ink: Each bag is printed with heat-activated invisible ink. As the order is fulfilled and the bag is packed, the heat from the items activates the ink to show when the bag is full. While this does not account for missing bags, it can ensure all intended hot entrees fill the proper-sized bag chosen. In this case, a partial image would imply that the order is not yet fulfilled.
- Scramble a word and have each letter present on a separate bag: The number of letters in the assigned word must match the number of bags in the order. The bags would have to be printed or labeled on-demand to be used for a particular order. While this would not prevent missing items within each bag, it would ensure all bags are present.
- Icons per menu item: If the store has a sticker per menu item, then the order fulfiller(s) can post a sticker on the bag matching what item they put in the bag. That way, customers and restaurants can both see at a glance what is in the bag without having to dig through it.
- Use a character or group of like characters to label a bag: Assign each order a TV show/ movie theme (such as Mickey & Minnie, The Simpsons, etc.) and match the number of characters to the number of bags, with a different individual printed/labeled on each back. The customer would have to remember their full group, but it could be used to indicate whether all bags in the order are present.
Claims:
Our idea is to use letters or pictures on the bags that make up the order, that when all the bags are together make a word or a complete picture or complete set of characters. Our idea can also have a bag that as it is filled with warm packages thermally triggers part of an image to appear, showing that the correct quantity is in the bag. A lot of the other ideas require the person collecting the packages to have a scanner to verify the correct number of bags and contents. Our idea provides a quick visual check.
TGCS Reference 2142
