BURGER KING® App

Having a large family, we’re no strangers to being pulled at the drive-thru while they conjure the order to feed my village. Which is why I wanted to give the app a chance. To know what it feels like to be every Jane, Bob and Harry who simply orders and takes off immediately with food in tow. You know, the ones I rather begrudgingly glare at in the rear view mirror as they drive off while I’m still sitting in the parking lot. I hope you enjoy your whopper, good sir. I’ll get to mine next year! I digress. So as you can imagine, I was ecstatic hearing the good news of such an app! Order beforehand and roll off victoriously in under five minutes? Sign me the heck up, my body is ready!! I regret to inform the inquiring masses that my happiness was short lived and dreams were most definitely shattered. I was still pulled. My wait was longer than usual. And my experience was not magical. I did NOT have it my way, people. Not even with the app. No sorcery here and I am most displeased. I give you three stars because I still acquired my food and I’m ashamed to admit it was delicious.

Dear reader : please excuse my hangry tone. There are many more things bothering me (same as the rest of us)than this app. BK app just becomes my lightening rod today. They completely screwed up the UX. It is now hard to customize a whopper. It used to have a simple highlight the topping option. Now it’s a confusing more, regular, light option with pluses and minuses around it. Also I can’t see where my cart is. What have I ordered? I click “order” and I’m dumped back to the beginning “where are you eating today”. Whoever did this UX should be fired. Here are some tips for these amateurs : 1. Have sensible defaults, especially based on what I’ve ordered before 2. Make it clear what my current order state is 3. Make it simple to continue my ordering from my order state screen. You guys don’t understand that UX in a app like this is to guide me to what I want and not throw me curveballs leaving me baffled and frustrate. Don’t you get it that 80 percent of your orders will come from only semi motivated buyers who won’t make an effort to do more? Rigging hoops for us to jump through will lose you business. I literally walked away from a BK because I couldn’t place an order on the phone and get a deal. Why not just order old school? Because I feel disrespected that you destroyed such a great experience. You must not care if you have my business or not. I got pizza instead.

Burger King has released its Impossible Whopper, a plant based burger, which costs nearly TWO DOLLARS MORE than the real meat equivalent. Their App only has coupon discounts for meat eaters. The sole discount (at the time of this writing) for the impossible whopper is tied to a meat option, so in essence is useless for someone who does not eat meat. All of the “Whopper” coupon discounts exclude “specialty” whoppers. The Impossible Whopper is considered a “specialty” item, so still no discounts there. The receipt which you receive from an in-store transaction is usually tied to a survey, which if completed earns the customer a free WHOPPER... again, specialty Whoppers are excluded from the offer. So, my final word to Burger King is this, you will fail as a business because your policies are against your customers. Your Whoppers never use ripe lettuce or tomatoes, they always taste bland because they’ve been harvested too early and your buns are always stale. The plant based patties, the few times we have tried them, are dry and hard. With no discounts available, we must assume this is a common practice, because theres no way we’re paying anymore of your establishments to ruin our dining experience. We now stand by our previous decision to no longer frequent BK which was made back in the early 90’s as it was apparently a correct choice. EABOD

I live in Astoria, NY which only has one location near my home (3310 Astoria Blvd). The App came in very handy and I went to BK more often being able to preorder deals and pay on my way home from work. This week they decided to remove themselves from the App from this location. What’s to like now? UPDATE: The location finally agreed to add themselves back to the ‘nearest location’ list, and I enjoyed going back using the money-saving specials. However, the last few months it will not process payments to prepay. I get a message, ‘error retrieving item pricing,’ with instructions to retry. Retrying never works. When to settings and contacted support. I was eventually emailed that I should clear cache and reinstall. It’s all hogwash. Didn’t work. Contacted again and they said they would escalate. That was months ago. Still useless. The reflection this gives of the Company is really disappointing. BK, please be aware that I spoke to management at my location and they said all their App customers are experiencing this. All those App customers are lost income to your business. If I wanted to deal with lines, I wouldn’t use App. My solution is to simply go to the McDonald’s App which has no technical problems and is down the road nearby. Think it’s time you address it.

So up until recently I have had minor issues. Mainly the app not showing what my actually store has and doesn’t have, the lack of options for a large icee(I know, trivial), other smaller items that I can deal with. But my last order has made me pretty upset. I ordered a whooper double and an icee, when I hit yo the store both the icee machine and broiler for the burger meat where down. I told the woman at the register that I just wanted a refund, she told me that the store has no control over that and I needed to contact app support. I have since contacted them and they are not telling me that the store needs to give me the refund but if they don’t to contact my bank. Sounds like someone doesn’t know what they’re doing. I shouldn’t have to contact ANY third party to get my money back. And now that I have this feeling I will not be using the app anymore since I have to call the store to insure that MY MONEY won’t be held up due to bad customer service. I want to be clear, I am blaming the app. Though the store has broken items, the workers can’t control that. Anyone working in customer service for the app should know how to help me rather than shove me off to someone else.