Increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction
Every day, customers provide feedback about Gordon Ordering and request new features or enhancements. Often, the development team can put the changes into production the next day. By establishing ongoing, iterative feedback loops with customers, Gordon Food Service is increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
"Before moving to Google Cloud Platform, the idea that we could take a customer's feature request and put it into production in less than 24 hours was man-on-the-moon stuff," says Craig. "Now, we do it all the time."
Users who initially started with the old ordering application experience improvements on a daily basis, yet the changes are seamless enough that their overall ordering experience remains consistent. Not surprisingly, GFS customers really like the new system, and the company notes it has received many accolades.
A scalable, flexible digital platform
The Google Cloud infrastructure makes Gordon Ordering much easier for engineers to maintain, as clusters are automatically upgraded and kept up to date with the latest release version of Kubernetes.
When GFS experiences seasonal fluctuations in order volume, Kubernetes Engine will allow it to quickly scale up and down to match demand. As US customers are brought on board, managed services such as Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Datastore will also scale easily, without increasing operational overhead.
In addition, the cloud infrastructure provides higher availability, robust security and disaster recovery, and easy workload portability between regions and across clouds.
Because restaurants typically operate under tight timelines and can order food items from a variety of suppliers, GFS loses business when their systems are unavailable or running slow. GCP helps solve this problem by allowing the company to deploy its ecommerce environment in multiple data centers, each with its own scaling capabilities.
If we needed to, we could tear everything down and build it back up in less than an hour and redeploy anywhere. That's the beauty of having Google Kubernetes Engine behind Gordon Ordering. Since we launched, we've had zero customer-facing downtime, so customers can always place orders.
— Derek Pontius, Software Architect, Gordon Food Service