McDonald’s tracks success of geofencing to streamline mobile orders
A fast-food hamburger giant is building on a digital monitoring system that measures performance of geofencing technology used to help fulfill mobile orders.
According to McDonald’s, mobile ordering has become the fastest-growing channel for its customers, with mobile orders growing by 5.8% in the U.S. from the second half of 2022 to 2023 as a share of all app transactions.
In 2024, McDonald’s began an initiative to expand its U.S. pilot of “Ready on Arrival” across its top six markets by 2025. The program enables McDonald’s crew members to begin assembling a customer's mobile order prior to their arrival at the restaurant and is part of a larger corporate effort that includes annual net new store growth of 4-5% and a technology partnership with Google Cloud.
[READ MORE: McDonald’s plans 10,000 new stores; partners with Google Cloud]
The retailer has integrated geofencing technology to help streamline the mobile ordering process. Geofencing notifies the restaurant when customers are approaching and prompts the crew to start preparing the order. According to McDonald’s, this enables more efficient and effective restaurant operations.
Following the launch of the new mobile-ordering pilot, McDonald’s analyzed data, customer feedback, and restaurant systems to measure overall performance, finding digital customer satisfaction scores improved while customer wait times were reduced by 60 seconds for patrons using curbside and front counter pickup options.
To help monitor the performance of its digital solutions, McDonald’s utilizes the New Relic observability platform. However, the retailer found it had limited visibility into background processing for mobile orders, including geofence triggers.
To overcome this challenge, the retailer developed a framework to use on top of New Relic, allowing it to add additional observability "over the air" without the need of an eight-week mobile app release cycle.
This framework captures data, providing information about each event based on configuration file settings, and was deployed without needing any mobile app code changes.
To capture mobile order status events, McDonald’s caches the geofence trigger and timestamp. The cached events are then published to New Relic once the mobile app is brought to the foreground. The retailer also developed internal dashboards to monitor and report on the performance of its geofencing technologies.
"Digital continues to be a huge growth driver for McDonald’s, and our new mobile-order experience is leading the way," Jonathan Kelly, director, product engineering, McDonald’s, said in a McDonald’s technical blog post on the Medium site.
Based in Chicago, McDonald's USA LLC operates approximately 13,500 U.S. restaurants, 95% of which are owned and operated by independent business owners.
