Quick service restaurants are the perfect blend of speed, convenience, and value, and are the top go-to dining choices for hungry diners to satisfy their appetite. With consumers growing embrace of technology, purchases through online channels have rapidly increased. To stay ahead of the game, QSRs are now adopting new payment technologies to cater to the customer’s demands.

We sat down with Mr. Hester Chew, the Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive of McThai Co Ltd. to talk about the role of customer experience in payments.

The world's renowned restaurant chain, McDonald's have been serving great tasting food to customers here in Thailand for more than 30 years. Besides serving meals in 250 outlets nationwide, McDonald's Thailand has also got growing online sales channels — www.mcdonalds.co.th and the McDelivery mobile application.

In September 2017, McDonald’s Thailand chose to partner with Omise to further enhance the purchase experience through their online sales channels.

Keeping up with the pace of innovation to cater to customer’s experiences.

“As a retailer, putting your customer’s expectations and needs ahead is key. Knowing what they want, as well as understanding why they want it is of equal importance. Remember that it’s not just about serving them today, but you also need to ensure a pleasant experience so that they become loyal, returning customers.”

"Technology has really been picking up, especially in the last couple of years and so being able to accept online payments is becoming more and more important for a business. Looking back when we first approached cashless payments 7 years ago, we're only talking about a single-digit transaction number. People have grown accustomed to technology, and now expect it to be part of the dining experience. To live up to customer’s demands of speed and convenience, and support our future ambitions, it is important that we have the right tools and technologies in place.”

Experience is what keeps customers happy.

“Online and offline are integrating into one. As retailers, you have to build that ecosystem where both sales channels work together seamlessly. For us, the role of customer experience in payments is all about faster checkouts and speedy processing time. These are the key things that are crucial to customer satisfaction.”

Optimizing the checkout flow on the McThai website and mobile app has been a big focus for us. We revamped the website and the mobile application and launched it in July 2017. Integrating with Omise, we were able to solve quite a few things around customer experience. The significant changes we see are reduced drop-offs at checkout and also the reduced steps in which our customers have to go through to complete the purchase. This is because we are able to leverage the payment technology that Omise has to offer.

“We are glad that we made the move. Things have been smoother for our customers and our team that works behind the scenes. We switched to Omise last year, and shortly after the transition, we saw a dramatic increase in credit card usage. We're talking about the number of transactions that have close to tripled within the first 6 months. In April last year, we were doing around 5000-7000+ card transactions, this year, we're seeing 18,000+ transactions.”