Mexican fast food chain Guzman y Gomez says it's improved its customer experience with the implementation of third-party integrations with Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Head of digital Dan McLean told an AWS Community chat the brand’s “stack of integrations” with popular delivery aggregators had also been a “huge labour saving for us”.
Before the integration was rolled out, orders would only arrive when the delivery driver arrived at the store.
“Once upon a time, the orders would come into those little tablets into stores, and there'd be someone physically having to just basically transcribe the orders into a point-of-sale system,” said McLean.
Now the fast food chain is directly integrated in with the likes of Uber Eats, customer orders can be printed directly from Guzman y Gomez’s own in-house system.
McLean added the new digital food order process meant in-store customers no longer had to wait in “a huge queue” while transcribing took place.
He said Guzman y Gomez was one of the first organisations in the Asia-Pacific region to adopt this approach with Uber Eats.
It was also one of the first retailers to integrate with Apple and Google Pay.
“At the time there was three of us doing it and we were the basically the first ones after McDonald's, who Uber Eats made that integration for," he said.
Guzman y Gomez has also been “able to switch off about like, 10 or so [Amazon] EC2 servers” which was “exciting moment” after enlisting the help of an agency to expand AWS functionality, according to McLean.
McLean said Guzman y Gomez began its digital transformation after seeing the customer landscape change roughly seven ago.
“They really set us up with some good foundations and started this digital transformation process, which has just been ongoing. I don't think it's ever going to stop really,” he said.
“Back then the digital transformation started with a pretty basic premise - how do we put a digital store in everyone's hands.
“Then as we've grown and grown, we've had to scale that right out.”
McLean added “that's been made possible by AWS and the infrastructure and the infrastructure that we've we've got access to there".
Running its own servers meant "you not only had to be a developer, you had to be a system administrator as well.
“The ability for us to scale on AWS has really been a major part of that solution,” he said.
Despite having a “a relatively small team in-house”, McLean said the company had “a huge roadmap of features that we want to implement”.
“That’s stuff that directly affects our own properties, our apps or websites, all that sort of thing,” he said.
In April, Guzman y Gomez announced it’s getting ready to launch a new app which promises a “fresh look, streamlined ordering process and heaps of exciting features that will make ordering GYG easier”.
