Chick-Fil-A Is The Most Popular Restaurant Chain 9 Years In A Row
Chick-Fil-A has been targetted by boycotts, but is the most popular restaurant in the country for a ninth year in a row.
According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) Restaurant Study, Chick-fil-A has once again secured the first place spot in the fast food category. For the ninth year in a row, Chick-fil-A remains at the top of the list with an 85 percent satisfaction rate, but Jimmy John’s is closing the gap with an 84 percent overall satisfaction rating.
The study sourced its information from a randomly selected pool of 16,250 customers VIA email between April 2022 and March 2023 and uses metrics including, but not limited to, the accuracy of food orders, quality of the mobile app, beverage quality, helpfulness of staff, and food quality.
For the ninth year in a row, Chick-fil-A remains at the top of the list with an 85 percent satisfaction rate, but Jimmy John’s is closing the gap with an 84 percent overall satisfaction rating.
From 2022 to 2023, Chick-fil-A saw a 2 percent increase in customer satisfaction, while Jimmy John’s has seen a more significant 6 percent increase. Jimmy John’s may very well be able to snag the first-place spot over Chick-fil-A if they continue to improve upon their service initiatives in 2024. Jimmy John’s can attribute some of this success to their improved speed of check-out and delivery that they’ve been marketing to consumers as “freaky fast.”
Though it may seem that Chick-fil-A may eventually lose its lead, they have recently rolled out a couple of new app features that will improve the quality of their food and service simultaneously. Chick-fil-A’s website tells us these new app features will be rolling out this summer.
The first feature utilizes a technology known as geofencing, which uses your app’s location services (if turned on) to let the kitchen staff know when you’re nearby so they can prep your order to be ready upon arrival. In other words, if this technology proves to be successful, Chick-fil-A customers will see a shorter wait time. More importantly, if the Chick-fil-A kitchen staff sees that you’re stuck in traffic, they can hold off on putting your food together so your meal doesn’t get cold at the pickup counter while it’s waiting for you.
The second noteworthy feature will give Chick-fil-A customers an estimated wait time when they submit an order through the mobile app. Though estimations aren’t always necessarily always on point, Chick-fil-A has asserted that their estimations are pretty accurate, and they consider factors like order complexity and order size through their own proprietary software to ensure a reasonably accurate wait time for customers.
Since this technology has just rolled out, we won’t see how this changes Chick-fil-A’s status on the satisfaction scale presented by the ASCI until next year’s survey is completed.
Though Chick-fil-A has garnered controversy in the past for donating millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ groups, they have since launched new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures that now have conservative organizations calling them out. Even though boycotts were encouraged by groups on both sides of the political spectrum at different times, Chick-fil-A continues to be loved by most of the country.
The data that we do have, however, indicates that Chick-fil-A, despite their occasional bad press, is operating their restaurants with a level of efficiency that customers recognize and appreciate when it comes to the overall quality of food, service, and in the case of their mobile app, user experience.
