KFC’s winning recipe for delivering exceptional customer experiences worldwide

With 32,000 restaurants across more than 150 countries, KFC has the widest global footprint of any quick service restaurant (QSR) brand. And with a new KFC opening every 3.5 hours, we’re showing no signs of slowing down as we work to become the number one QSR in every market where we operate. Fueling this continued growth is our best tasting fried chicken as well as distinct and seamless experiences for guests and team members around the world.

Since 2022, KFC has partnered closely with Qualtrics to better fulfill our commitment to great experiences. On the mainstage of the Qualtrics X4 Summit just this past week, our Global Chief Operations Officer, Rob Swain, shared insight into KFC’s omnichannel experience management program that allows us to capture insights from billions of customers around the world and enables hundreds-of-thousands of employees to act when and where it matters most.

Experience Management is critical to KFC’s growth

Experience management is a critical part of KFC reaching the number one spot in every market, and so we need the ability to consistently deliver great customer and employee experiences that meet the unique needs and expectations of our guests and team members around the world.

And with our truly global footprint, we needed an experience management program that could scale internationally and bring together thousands of franchisees across multiple markets under a single program. Additionally, it needed to bring together insights from the multiple channels customers can use to interact with QSRs today.

When you think back to just a handful of years ago, restaurant managers only needed to focus on two order channels – front counter and drive-thru. Today there are many more, including kiosks, online reviews, in-app and delivery aggregators like Uber Eats or Doordash – which even differ across markets. Long story short, restaurant managers are drowning in data.

To make it easier for our restaurant managers to understand their customer experience across these channels, we needed one omnichannel view bringing all this disparate customer feedback together. And to ensure a consistent customer experience in every market, we also needed to standardize our approach.

Customer insights when and where they’re needed most

With Qualtrics, KFC has implemented a global omnichannel experience management program bringing in structured and unstructured feedback from post-transaction surveys across our in-store and online, online reviews and delivery platforms specific to each market. The program has increased customer feedback by 300%, giving team members valuable insights to improve the customer experience.

Customer insights are made available to KFC’s employees in Qualtrics’ dashboards specific to their role and location, combining feedback from across channels, and instantly surfacing issues that need to be fixed. For instance, restaurant managers get insight into customer feedback specific to their location, whereas market managers and executives see insights at a business unit level. The result is employees, wherever they are in the world, are empowered to focus on where they can have the greatest impact to deliver a consistently great customer experience.

Our team members no longer need to dig through reports. They get the insights they need, when and where they need them. And that’s helped them quickly identify what they need to improve for their customers.

The positive impact of KFC’s omnichannel approach to customer experience is being felt across markets. To give two quick examples, within a year of launching the program in France, we became the number 1 quick service restaurant in Google reviews. In South Africa, we improved order accuracy after noticing delivery orders were more likely to be incorrect compared to other channels.

Great employee experiences power the best customer experiences

KFC understands that great customer experiences start with great employee experiences, which is why we also use Qualtrics to gather regular employee feedback throughout the year and in pivotal moments like onboarding and exits (currently pilot-only in select markets). Similar to the CX program, feedback from our employees is shared with managers in dashboards specific to their team and role.

KFC’s company culture directly impacts the experience of our customers, and so it is critical we can understand the issues impacting our employee experience. The benefits of this are exponential – feedback from employees allows us to provide a better customer and employee experience, and tells us where we can give our team members more opportunities to learn and develop at KFC. And this is important, because many of our best managers have been promoted through the company.

Employee insights also allow us to understand the relationship between customer and employee experience. For example, we can now see how the launch of a new campaign or menu item impacts employees, and whether it actually has a positive or negative impact on their ability to deliver a great customer experience,

KFC looks to the future with AI

Looking to the future, KFC is focused on using more AI capabilities from Qualtrics to improve its customer experience, including predictive analytics.

Customers expect more than quick service. They expect us to anticipate what they want and need. That’s why we’re exploring how predictive analytics can help us move beyond reacting to trends and getting ahead of them. These capabilities are going to speed up drive-thru service, improve digital ordering, and deliver more personalized experiences—so that every interaction is frictionless and our guests can focus on eating the best fried chicken out there.

For KFC, the key to great, consistent customer experiences is listening and acting with speed and scale.

By connecting feedback across every touchpoint, giving teams insights they can use right away, and using AI to stay ahead of customer needs, we’re delivering experiences that keep our guests coming back. Turning insights into action isn’t optional—it’s essential. And with Qualtrics we’re shaping a future where every interaction matters.