Alexander Popper with Hellometer

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Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today, we have with us Alex Popper with Hellometer. Welcome, Alex. Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to tell us about hello, Medair. How are you serving, folks?

Alex Popper: [00:00:47] Sure. So Hellometer is an artificial intelligence tool that helps restaurant owners grow revenue using cameras to monitor and improve customer service times. So in plain English, its regular look and security cameras that monitor both drive through and dining rooms and show you where and when your team is losing you revenue because your service speed is slow.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:10] So now how is this kind of leveraging artificial intelligence?

Alex Popper: [00:01:15] So it’s entirely an artificial intelligence solution, we actually deploy a fully, fully fledged neural network inside each restaurant that processes the video to understand what’s happening, in particular what what your customers are experiencing.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:29] So what exactly am I seeing when you’re recording?

Alex Popper: [00:01:36] Yeah, so it’s a great question. There’s there’s two things that are happening. The first is the camera is seeing a world that is really similar to what, like a self-driving car. So it’s understanding people coming into the restaurant and what they’re doing. And you can see that on the user’s end through a video feed where it’s literally identifying individual customers and and where they are in their in their process throughout your restaurant, whether they’re going through the line or ordering or getting a food or sitting down. And then the other thing that you see is our service speed response. So you can imagine it a lot like a typical drive through timer. But for your dining rooms as well as your drive through where we’re showing you what your speed of service looks like for each day part as well as outliers, hey, it looks like there was a 15 minute long service interaction here, as well as highlights about where and when there may be opportunities to to boost revenue and improve that that service.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:41] So when I’m looking at the am I ever looking at the video feed or I’m getting some data from the feed is kind of now taking what it’s seeing and saying where there’s room for improvement.

Alex Popper: [00:02:54] Yes. So it’s all the above. There’s video feed which you can view and then we report in three areas. So we have an app that looks at the live, live speed of service and you can see that on your smartphone or tablet. And again, the output is is sort of similar to what a drive through time would give you. We also have a Web app where you can go and drill down and look at a little bit more of kind of root cause analysis. You understand where there’s bottlenecks and what’s causing them. And and we get pretty granular with the data that we deliver. So it’s a tool to to really kind of diagnose. And then we also send daily emails to owners or their management staff or even line employees, showing them like across an enterprise, how their speed of service looked like for the previous day, as well as their performance relative to other other other other locations in the brand.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:50] So can you share what something that would be actionable that I would get from this as opposed to those other solutions?

Alex Popper: [00:03:58] Yeah. So it’s really interesting when you. Begin to have speed of service as a core component of your operations, all of a sudden there is there is a lot of things that come to the forefront when you have that as kind of a spotlight. So, for example, we just wrapped up a major case study with a large sandwich chain, and there they’re able to improve typical speed of service for for each franchisee by just shy of a minute. So. Forty seven seconds. And that’s coming from things like understanding, hey, we’re understaffed during during certain periods the day or we need to put up placards that are missing for the the actual recipes or there’s training opportunities or we need to help guests navigate the menu so that they go through the order step a lot, a lot more quickly. And so really being able to pinpoint and identify where those parts of the business that you can you can start to to actually pick up speed.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:03] So now when you’re kind of rolling this out, so first I would imagine you’re selling it to the franchise or in a lot of cases, is that correct?

Alex Popper: [00:05:14] Actually, we sell primarily to the franchisees. And that’s because what we do what our goal is, is to actually boost revenue. We we there’s a very direct relationship between speed of service and revenue. The science on this is for about every seven seconds, you can decrease speed of service. You’ll pick up at about a one percent increase in revenue. And that that comes from from winning market share away from nearby competitors. It comes from decreased customer churn. And so that tends to be really, really attractive to to the individual franchisees.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:49] So so then that the individual franchisees like the systems that were given to me, they’re great. But I think we can tweak some stuff here. And I’m really curious to see how how a meter can help me kind of improve what?

Alex Popper: [00:06:06] Yeah, that’s that’s right. I think it’s useful to sort of point out what Haslemere does. That’s that’s really different and unique. So QSR is all about speed of service. It is quite literally in the name and the core value proposition. But historically, there have not been really good ways to to measure that. I mean, for some brands, they have a posse and you can look at the time between an order gets placed in a time that the order gets completed. But that’s it. It doesn’t give you a lot of granularity. And there’s all kinds of problems with that. Right. It doesn’t it doesn’t actually track the customer experience, which is as soon as they walk in the door. And so all of a sudden we’re able to give a reliable tool that can’t be treated. You can’t bump orders off early and really, really gives a very clear picture of each each customer interaction. And that’s that’s just not something that’s been available to folks before. So especially for multiunit owners who are not in their restaurant each and every day, we’re able to paint them a very clear picture of of what’s happening. And that’s really exciting, especially when you can do that for effectively an update to their security system.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:13] And so the purpose of this and to be clear, the purpose of this isn’t to go Bob’s not doing his job. It’s to kind of get a holistic picture of ways to improve the speed of service and the and the customer experience.

Alex Popper: [00:07:29] That’s exactly right for us. We we build ourselves as an operations management platform, not a people management platform. It’s less it’s less about Bob and what he’s doing and really understanding across your business where and when you’re you’re simply losing revenue because because service speed is slow. We think that that is a lot more interesting in terms of being able to increase your bottom line, then have a closer management of of like Bob directly

Lee Kantor: [00:07:58] Because you’re working you’re trying to improve a system. You’re not trying to solve a problem.

Alex Popper: [00:08:05] Yeah. And, you know, people are part of part of the system and it’s it’s not part of part of the solution then may go and and be having having conversations with Bob or, you know, conversations with Bob’s manager. But the first step is really being able to identify where where there are opportunities. And and and Bob as Bob as a part of a complicated system. But it’s also it’s also larger, larger than just just Bob himself.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:32] Right. But I would imagine if they’re rolling this out or thinking about it, they’re they’ve got to be mindful about how Bob is viewing this in terms of his privacy and what you’re looking for and looking at.

Alex Popper: [00:08:44] Yeah, that’s exactly right. And so so precisely to your point, we don’t we don’t what what they call it on Aiyaz is collecting PII personally identifiable information. We don’t we don’t uniquely identify Bob. Everything that we surface is is. Aggregated, and so we’re we we work very, very hard to make sure that a, there’s a system in place where folks can feel rewarded when there’s good, good, good service outcomes, but B, e, that they’re not feeling penalized or uniquely called out or identified and and work really, really hard to to kind of uphold the highest expectations when it comes to employee digital privacy.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:28] So now how has the rollout been for you? Are the franchisees or is this something that’s going like gangbusters, that they’re all kind of, hey, where is this been on my life? Or is this something that needs a lot of explaining and education to see the value?

Alex Popper: [00:09:43] No, you know, it’s not something that needs a ton of explanation. It’s always been a good idea. You take something like Drive Through is right, drive through. Timers have been around since the 70s in various forms. And you would never in a million years think of opening a drive through without a drive through. Timewell dining rooms really aren’t any different. The only difference is that the technology just hasn’t hasn’t been there before. And so it’s really exciting being able to deliver the first a timer for dining rooms and also be able to apply that technology to the drive through as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:23] So now how quickly can they start seeing actionable results from when they say, OK, we’re flipping the switch and all the cameras are on to OK, now I got information. Now I can tweak the system a little bit.

Alex Popper: [00:10:36] So it takes about a month to start to see really tangible results. And there’s there’s a couple of sort of sort of classic things that we’ll see. One is just before and after difference and speed of service. Another thing that we’ll see is typically for multiunit owners, they’ll have kind of a range of performance. Right. They’ll have some locations that are performing really well, some that are really performing, performing pretty poorly. And once once you start kind of managing based on speed of service, you what we’ll see is that that like like bottom tier really beginning to disappear and and locations kind of converging. So that stuff can can can happen as quickly is as 30 days post some of the things that you do to start addressing speed of service issues. Do take a little bit of time, things like employee training and so on. And so so some of the biggest results we’ll see are about 60 days of that.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:32] Was there any type of placebo effect of just putting cameras in that improves the speed?

Alex Popper: [00:11:38] Oh, I think it’s a huge effect and I don’t think it’s a placebo. What you’re doing is there’s all kinds of parts of your business where you have a lot of information, you have a lot of information about inventory and a lot of information about revenue and so on. And despite being a really important part of the QSR business, this is just not an area that that that there has been a lot of tools to really understand deeply. And so once, you know, once you start reporting on this stuff, it’s really a strong signal to your your staff that, hey, guess what? This is something that is important. We care about it and we’re tracking and reporting on it now. And that that has a huge effect on the way that an organization runs. Now, is

Lee Kantor: [00:12:19] There a gamification element to this where I can be kind of seeing which is the best performing store and then everybody knows and they can be working towards improving, you know, a number or a metric?

Alex Popper: [00:12:32] Absolutely. That that also is a very, very large and it’s passive. It’s not not part of the active management, but it is a very, very large component to success here, is being able to show stores relative to themselves how they’re they’re performing and if they’re improving or if they’re backtracking, how they’re doing relative to other other locations in the brand. And we we very much build gamification into the design. So those emails that I sent you daily, we also have a weekly email that will show a roundup of, hey, this is this is the best performing location. And this is this is the most improved in terms of the rankings or in terms of overall speed. And what we really love is, is the kind of engagement that that drives between managers and their staff now.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:22] So those emails go out to the individual employees as well.

Alex Popper: [00:13:27] Yeah, I mean, we each brand runs a little bit differently. There’s no one size fits all here. And different brands care about different different parts of their service. But it can it can be a signal that just goes to management and it can be a signal that goes down to everybody, everybody working, working the shift.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:45] So now what do you need more of at this point? You need just more brands to try this. Do you know, is the technology? I’m sure the technology is always evolving and you’re always working on that. But what do you need? More more funding to just keep working on this?

Alex Popper: [00:14:00] No, we’re pretty well funded. So we came out of Y Combinator last summer, which is really kind of the premier seed stage incubator for for technology startups. Yeah, I mean, at this point, what what what what we always love to do is to start with new brands. So there’s there’s a bunch of brands that we’ve started started having franchisees adopting. But but we are we’re always game to take on new franchisees or franchisors that are really interested in diving headfirst into the world of EHI in the QSR space.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:37] And then so does it matter if they’re an emerging brand with, you know, 20 locations, or do you prefer to work with those or do you want the multi thousand? You know,

Alex Popper: [00:14:50] The A.I. is agnostic and it doesn’t care if you have one location or forty thousand locations. I do think that there is a real opportunity here for emerging brands to begin to get a technological edge over competitors in their space that are maybe more established or larger by by being a little bit a little bit quicker and early into adopting a technology. It’s really a very different type of technology. The nature of A.I. is that it gets better the more that it’s use, because you’re right, it is continually being trained. So it learns from the data that it’s exposed to. And what that means is that it will become more valuable more quickly to early adopters as opposed to competitors who wait on the sidelines. So that’s that’s a really unique property of A.I. and it’s fundamentally different than other technologies. And so there’s a real, real opportunity there for four emerging brands that that are kind of a little bit more nimble and able to adopt this in a way that that that established brands may take a little bit longer. Some brands are doing doing pretty McDonald’s has been pretty bullish on adopting I but but there has been a lot of kind of a conservative type of approach that I think I think that emerging brands can distinguish themselves by by by staying away from now.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:12] Have you learned anything that, like low hanging fruit ways to speed up the organization kind of in a generic way so that anybody could benefit, like have you learn anything, just best practices from seeing this being deployed in multiple locations and multiple brands, multiple foods?

Alex Popper: [00:16:32] Yeah. You know, I think I think the biggest one is the one that you mentioned. You call it a placebo effect, call it a spotlight. But, you know, just having a signal that is true. That is it can’t be diluted. It’s really, really hard to to defeat a camera system that that report speed of service and that then makes that a part of your management process and practice. And so now when you’re having your team meetings, you’re talking about speed and how how how long customers are waiting in line before they even get to the order. You’re you’re beginning to reward based on that. That is a really easy thing that you can do again for the price of a security system that then can can start to impact the bottom line pretty pretty substantially. I mean, that that that average forty seven second improvement that that we’re seeing, I mean, that’s really huge. The implications that that has on everything from revenue to queue length to customer satisfaction. And it really doesn’t take that much to start to do that for your brand.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:44] Good stuff. Well congratulations on all the success. If somebody wants to learn more about Hellometer, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website?

Alex Popper: [00:17:53] The best place to reach us is hello, Meeta. Oh, so it’s. Oh, and etr. Oh, well, I should say we also have a newsletter as well. So if you’re interested in EHI and the QSR space we publish pretty regularly, you can sign up for that. And it’s it’s a pretty great place to start.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:11] Well, Alex, thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Alex Popper: [00:18:14] Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:16] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Franchise Marketing Radio.