QDOBA improves team productivity with Sinch Unified Communications

QDOBA Mexican Eats is a leading fast-casual Mexican chain with more than 750 restaurants located across the United States and in Canada. Headquartered in San Diego, California; the company was voted the “Best Fast Casual Restaurant” as part of the USA Today 10 Best Readers’ Choice Awards. It also ranked No. 228 on Entrepreneur’s 2022 Franchise 500 list. 

Committed to offering quality, freshly prepared entrées, the brand makes a range of menu items daily in its restaurants’ kitchens. Qdoba began franchising in 1997 and continued to grow through the early 2000s until its eventual acquisition by Jack in the Box Incorporated in 2003. In 2018, Qdoba was purchased from Jack in the Box with funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management LLC.  

Challenge: New infrastructure for a new office 

Prior to its 2018 acquisition, Qdoba was leveraging Jack in the Box's Avaya phones with AT&T services.  

Now no longer a subsidiary, the company was faced with the potential expense of standing up its own service in its new corporate office and call center along with support for its field personnel. Moreover, whatever communications platform the company deployed needed to integrate with the communication tools Qdoba's employees were already using.  

These requirements would be challenging enough on their own without the fact that the system also needed to be fully functional by the time Qdoba moved into its new corporate office in just over a year-and-a-half.  

Solution: Purpose-built Unified Communications 

Qdoba not only needed an in-office PBX solution, but also instant messaging, presence, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and unified messaging across both desktop and PC. Because the company used Microsoft Office 365 extensively, full integration was also a must. Finally, Qdoba needed a fully functional contact center solution with softphones to replace physical desktop devices.  Sinch deployed our Unified Communications service at Qdoba's Phoenix, Arizona call center in mid-May 2019, and by early June 2019 we were also live at the company's corporate office in San Diego. We worked closely with Qdoba throughout the implementation, prioritizing agility as we worked to meet the company's needs. This was how we were able to address several requests which were not in the original company's scope during the deployment.  

These included a dedicated number for the CEO, 13 conference rooms, and 11 phone rooms, failover flexibility for Qdoba's third-party catering vendor, and two multifunction fax/printer devices and fax-to-email services. We also distributed brandable training documentation on using our solution alongside a link to our Knowledge Base.  

Results: Seamless, reliable, and fully integrated 

We've kept in touch with Qdoba post-implementation, providing them with 24x7 technical support, ongoing training support, and on-demand training. Since deployment, the company has used our solution extensively to support organization-wide communication and collaboration.  

For both Sinch and our services, they've nothing but praise.  

"As part of our carve-out from Jack in the Box we needed a solution that could be implemented quickly as we moved into a new building. Sinch provided that solution and it was easy to get up and running. They worked extremely hard on a very short timeline to make our implementation successful. Service has been good throughout, and while we don't have any definitive measures for tracking ROI, anecdotal satisfaction has been high, with very few helpdesk tickets." Eric Rosenzweig, vice president of information technology, Qdoba