How to Leverage the Drive-Thru Study as a Core Brand

What can the industry’s top drive-thru brands learn from one another?

In a world where convenience is the primary currency, the drive-thru lane has become the most critical touchpoint for the modern quick-service restaurant. Intouch Insight’s Annual Drive-Thru Study highlights carefully selected Core Brands as the QSR industry leaders. It provides actionable datapoints across speed, accuracy, food quality, friendliness, and suggestive selling. By benchmarking these Core Brands across these major metrics, the study offers the most definitive look at the competitive landscape available today.

Being featured in the study is only the starting point. The greater opportunity lies in using the findings to uncover where performance is strongest, where it can improve, and how to act on both.

4 Practical Ways Core Brands Use the Drive-Thru Study

1. Competitive Benchmarking at a Granular Level

The first step in any strategic overhaul is identifying the gap between current performance and industry excellence. As a Core Brand, you have the ability to benchmark your Speed of Service with incredible precision. You can break down the experience into several key categories:

• Total Time: The full duration from the moment a car enters the lane until they depart.

• Wait Time versus Service Time: Determining if your bottleneck is in the line or at the window.

• Window Time: The specific time spent interacting with the staff and receiving food.

• Order Accuracy and Food Quality: Evaluating the technical success of the transaction.

• Overall Satisfaction: The guest’s perception of the entire experience.

• Friendliness and Hospitality: Evaluating suggestive selling, friendliness, and other hospitality-related metrics that define the guest connection.

To make this data actionable, pull your brand’s scores and compare them against both the segment and the overall study averages. Identify the top three KPIs where you’re lagging by a noteworthy amount. These are your "red zones." If you’ve been a featured brand for at least two years, monitor your trending data year over year to see if your initiatives are actually moving the needle.

2. Grounding Training and Coaching in Real Data

Data should always be the foundation of your training modules. If you want your frontline teams to change their behavior, show them the "why" behind the "what." Use the study to justify investments in onboarding and targeted coaching programs. Specifically, use these points to drive change:

• Friendliness Impact: Show your team that friendliness drives both satisfaction, speed, and accuracy. When employees are engaged, they are more likely to get the order right.

• The Cost of Repetition: Having to repeat orders costs roughly 1 minute and 25 seconds.

When you present these numbers to a store manager, the need for clear communication becomes a matter of operational efficiency. Use these findings to conduct practical role plays and video review sessions with your frontline teams.

3. Operational Improvement and Hospitality

The Drive-Thru Study helps you identify and close technical gaps that might be slowing your operations down.

Our data shows that clear communication and "active" order confirmation can save nearly 90 seconds per car. This represents an enormous amount of time when multiplied by hundreds of cars per day across thousands of locations.

To capitalize on this, consider these actions:

• Prioritize Hardware Upgrades: Use the data to prove that brands with older speaker systems are lagging in accuracy.

• Mandate "Script the Screen" Protocols: Ensure every guest sees their order confirmed on a digital display to reduce errors at the window. If a digital display isn’t available, verbal confirmation of the order takes place.

• Standardize Hospitality Rituals: Implement specific greeting and closing scripts that the study identifies as drivers of high satisfaction.

4. Strategic Product and Tech Decisions

When it’s time to invest in new technology, let the data lead the way. Leverage the study’s Voice AI findings to understand the current landscape of automated ordering. Consider these findings from the research:

• Speed Benefits: AI has the potential to improve speed.

• Accuracy Risks: AI often struggles with complex customizations and can increase the number of repeat orders if not implemented correctly.

• The Human Rescue: Systems with a "human in the loop" rescue accuracy to around 95%.

Knowing this helps you design a smarter, phased AI rollout. You don't have to go all-in on a system that might frustrate your guests. Instead, build solid fallback rules that ensure a human takes over the moment the AI falters.

5. Tracking Performance Trends Over Time

One of the greatest advantages of participating in the Drive-Thru Study is the ability to look beyond a single year’s results. With years of drive-thru data, Core Brands can identify meaningful trends over time, showing:

• where performance is improving;

• where challenges persist; and

• how operational changes may be influencing the guest experience.

This longer-term view can be especially valuable for measuring the impact of training, technology investments, staffing changes, or process updates, giving brands a clearer picture of progress over time rather than relying on a single snapshot.

Let’s Partner for Better Drive-Thru Insights

The value of the Drive-Thru Study grows when you apply it to your specific business challenges. Whether you're looking to shave seconds off window times or boost your "friendly" scores in a specific region, we can help you slice the data to find the answers.

If you're already part of the study and want a personalized readout of your brand’s performance, or if you're interested in becoming a core brand in the 26th Annual Drive-Thru Study, get in contact with us.