Catering to Convenience

Boston Market has been serving up home-style meals to time-starved families for nearly a quarter century. Through some 630 corporate-owned restaurants in 28 states, the Golden, Colo.-based company offers customers freshly prepared meals without the headache of shopping, prepping, cooking and clean-up.

But harried moms and others seeking a break from the usual fast-food fare weren’t the only consumers Boston Market was hungry to woo, and in 2002 it launched a national catering program. Convenient locations, some with drive-throughs, made Boston Market an attractive option for B2B functions like company meetings and banquets, as well as events like graduations and holidays.

Not long after the national rollout, Boston Market actively sought a way to enhance its catering services using tools that allowed customers to order catering online. The company hoped to provide a more robust e-commerce solution for customers, customer service representatives, store personnel and its dedicated catering sales staff.

In addition to scalability, Boston Market required a system that would allow its restaurants to receive and fulfill orders based on real-time inventory and staffing capabilities. It also wanted the ability to track and manage the order process at every step, regardless of whether the purchase was made by a business or individual customer, and the ability to offer a two-hour window for large pick-up orders and three-hour turnaround for deliveries ordered online.

National accounts, particularly those in the pharmaceutical field, “are the bedrock” upon which the company has built its catering business, according to director of enterprise development Evan Eakin. “Because we have a brand that is recognized by customers, it makes it easy [for catering clients] to say, ‘Well, we’re going to bring in Boston Market.’”

Boston Market selected Sterling Commerce, a Columbus, Ohio-based provider of solutions for business process integration, to provide a fully managed and hosted environment for its e-commerce solution. Before it implemented Sterling Multi-Channel Selling Solution, Boston Market catering customers would either call a toll-free number and order through a CSR or contact their local restaurant directly.

Now the company can accept an order and automatically route it to the unit best suited for fulfillment based on individual restaurant profiles that include fulfillment capacity and customer satisfaction ratings. In turn, store personnel can view all incoming orders and monitor fulfillment and delivery at every step in the process.

The Multi-Channel Selling Solution allows CSRs to take customer orders, check the status of existing orders and make any requested changes seamlessly and around the clock. This has become particularly helpful as Boston Market handles more delivery-based catering orders, a business model that “is significantly more complex,” Eakin says, “because we need to look at the store’s base business, its availability and capacity.”

Other determinants when routing orders include the number of drivers at a particular location and proximity to the delivery destination “because we don’t want to overburden a store or compromise food quality.”

Volume and flexibility
Jim Bengier, global industry executive, retail for Sterling Commerce, says the Multi-Channel Solution is an off-the-shelf product that was a good fit for Boston Market. “When you look at the amount of different products that they offer and the flexibility in configuring a dinner any which way the customer wants,” he says, “Boston Market needed a way to manage both its product and pricing.”
Sterling’s SOA-based solution automates every step of the configure, price and quote processes, helping to generate additional revenue while reducing the costs associated with incorrect sales orders. “It’s also easier to implement a standardized product because it’s been thoroughly tested,” Bengier says.

Using the Multi-Channel Solution, Boston Market has enjoyed a significant increase in its catering business, and “the customer experience going across all channels has been well received,” Bengier says, “not only on the seller’s side but for the customer, as well.”

In fact, Boston Market is driving more than half of its catering sales business through its website as customers have become more comfortable with the convenience of ordering online. With product photos and descriptions, the online selling environment has contributed to higher average check sizes, as well.

Though Eakin won’t reveal specific figures, he says Boston Market is “pleased with our results and we continue to see a greater and greater percentage of our customers ordering direct themselves.” That’s good news for the bottom line, since the Sterling solution has allowed Boston Market’s CSR staff to grow incrementally even as its revenues increase exponentially.