West Bromwich Albion Football Club has become the first Barclays Premier League club to trial the Q App’s mobile ordering platform, enabling fans to place orders and make purchases within The Hawthorns stadium from their mobile phones.
As well as removing the need to carry cash or even credit cards, Q App will mean Albion supporters can avoid queuing to make their orders, while also enabling staff to process more orders and even promote special offers.
The service will launch inside the East Stand at the Liverpool home game on February 2, before gradually being rolled out to the rest of The Hawthorns ground if proved successful.
Reducing long queues
With tens of thousands of fans attending football matches, long queues at bars and catering kiosks are a familiar sight, not only impacting supporters’ match-day experience but also severely limiting the number of orders that can be processed in two tightly-defined time slots: before the match and at half-time. These situations drive potential customers away simply because it takes too long to take their order, which directly equates to lost revenue.
Q App’s solution will enable Albion fans to manage the entire ordering process from their mobile phone, both before and during the game.
Staff view the orders on the supplied Q App tablet and pre-prepare the products, which the fans then simply collect at their chosen time and location. Crucially, payments are taken via customers’ credit card at the time of ordering, both accelerating the collection process but also removing the possibility of fraud or venues having to foot the cost of non-collected products.
Enhancing the supporter ‘experience’
Albion’s Sales & Marketing Director, Adrian Wright, commented: “Enhancing our supporters’ match-day experience is of paramount importance and improving the efficiency of our catering processes is a key part of that. Q App ticks both boxes and will hopefully provide us with an innovative solution to the problem of serving such large numbers of fans in short periods of time.”
Serge Taborin, Q App CEO, added: “Q App is revolutionising the ordering process in busy venues and the platform has already proven itself in some of the UK’s busiest establishments. This launch with our first Premier League partner is a huge testament to the quality of our solution and we look forward to working with West Bromwich Albion to enhance the in-stadium experience for their fans. We have also had a lot of interest from bars and pubs around the Hawthorns ground, as they look to benefit from thousands of fans with Q App on their phones seeking to have pre- or post-match food and drink in the area.”