What technology makes the most sense for you adopt in your restaurant? Much of it depends on your service category and your guests’ attitudes about using tech, according to new research published by the National Restaurant Association. In the association’s first post-pandemic research about technology integration in restaurants, it found that while three-quarters of operators say using technology gives them a competitive edge, many still see opportunities to do more with it. While some tech that makes perfect sense in a quick-service setting would feel out of place in a fine dining restaurant, a universal theme came through in the research: Guests across the board like technology that facilitates ordering and payment – whether that happens via a smartphone app or a tablet at the table. If you can identify bottlenecks in this area and resolve them in ways that are intuitive for your guest demographic, this could be a helpful place to focus future tech investment. It may help you capitalize on the final interactions you have with guests before they collect their order from you or leave your restaurant after a meal. When their experience is smooth, they are primed to join your loyalty program, leave a positive online review, or share photos of their experience with friends. Does your existing tech provide an easy and positive final interaction with a guest? We eat with our eyes – or at the very least, the images we see of a dish have more power to sway our ordering choices than the text descriptions we read. In fact, Grubhub found that including professional photos in your menu can increase your sales by 30 percent. Even if you don’t want to overload your menu with images, there are many places beyond your menu where images can drive sales – on your website, in app-based communications to guests, in social media posts. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s becoming easier for restaurants to generate accurate, quality images of menu items – all with just a series of text prompts. Two startups are making it possible for restaurants to do just this. Hackernoon reports that Lunchbox collaborated with OpenAI to launch a food photo generator, and SWIPEBY has a text-to-photo tool that generates food photos based on menu descriptions. It will likely take a few tries, but you may be able to create a close likeness of the profitable dishes you want to promote by simply describing their ingredients and appearance to these tools. Are you making the most of your digital orders? Recently, the National Restaurant Association assessed data from Circana/CREST, which found that digital orders comprised 15 percent of all foodservice orders last year. That’s more than triple the rate of digital orders before the pandemic. Digital orders often result in higher bill amounts and improved guest data, so making your app’s user experience smooth and easy is worthwhile. Now is a good time to make sure your app is ready for your customers – or is at least not holding you back from connecting with them. A Nation’s Restaurant News Report suggests using A/B testing – comparing two versions of a prospective change – to ensure you maximize the performance of a new feature or menu item. You (or, if applicable, the company developing your app) can try this with a range of updates to your app, including the sign-in options you offer, the images you use to promote your menu, copy styles or color options, search functionality and payment flow. You may not know what could be improved about your digital ordering experience until you have users respond to different versions of it, then make incremental changes in response to their input. For every dollar a restaurant invests in food waste reduction, it generates $8 in savings, according to the World Resources Institute. In a business of slim margins, that can add up to significant savings – and that’s just counting food waste. Are there areas of your operation where waste management in general could be better? Your technology can help you identify and manage them on an ongoing basis. Start with your food and the other supplies you need to serve guests and run your business. Your inventory management system can help you improve your order precision and ingredient use so you avoid spoilage and can more readily identify when theft occurs – or be alerted in the moment if there has been a run on a particular supply. Using tech tools to manage portions (and measure discarded ingredients) can help you ensure your staff, regardless of how long they have been working in the business, are serving dishes of a consistent size and using ingredients tip-to-tail. Energy waste can generate significant expense too – one study found that 45-70 percent of electricity is wasted in commercial kitchens due to insufficient training and poor equipment maintenance, for example. Tech-based training and digital maintenance logs can help you manage that waste and alert you to potential problems. Beyond that, consider energy-efficient lighting and equipment, as well as sensor-monitored equipment that can be controlled remotely and also help you monitor malfunctioning appliances before they become a problem that generates significant waste. When you read your restaurant’s guest reviews, where do you see opportunities to improve your hospitality? If negative feedback tends to be more about the speed and ease of your service than about your menu, you may be able to make some marked improvements to their experience using tech. For some guests, it may not take much to tarnish an otherwise positive dining experience: Perhaps they have to wait for their check when they are eager to leave, are unable to easily split the bill when dining with a group, come in starving and don’t know when their order may arrive, have a less-than-smooth ordering process on your website or mobile app, or struggle to find a member of staff when they have a problem with their meal. Looking at your guest journey, both in your dining room and offsite, where are people apt to hit snags? Can your current tech stack help streamline those issues? At the same time, consider how you can tap these tools to gather feedback from guests at the precise point when it is most helpful to your business – like immediately after guests finish their meal, or, in the case of a problem with an order, an alert in the moment. Your top 20 percent of guests are gold – and hopefully your loyalty program is already making it well worth their while to continue giving you their business. Still, there is a lot of potential in the remaining 80 percent of the guest pool, particularly at a time when even those not in your loyalty program are giving you a partial data trail to work with. Are you seizing opportunities to boost your traffic this season with visits from those guests? A recent Nation’s Restaurant News report shared that at FSTEC, the technology conference held in Dallas last fall, restaurant leaders addressed how they are trying to boost traffic by targeting the 80 percent. Responses ranged from using anonymized credit card data to track these guests and then expose them to ads on social media, to using targeted ad features paired with geofencing technology to attract guests who have the restaurant’s app. In your own restaurant, how can you use what data you have on your bottom 80 percent of guests, then identify areas that might help you nudge these people to visit? Maybe some of these guests have kids and will be looking for a snack to pick up after soccer practice – or an easy meal for a group afterwards. They could be prime targets for discounts designed to drive visits at certain times of day when you could use the traffic (and possibly be more apt to join your top 20 percent of guests as a result). How smart is your kitchen? While the Internet of Things (IoT) is making it possible for more restaurant kitchens to track food supplies and minimize waste, IoT-connected sensors are also enabling what can be a key selling point for today’s restaurant guests: hyper-personalization. Specifically, the connection of the IoT and your customer relationship management system can help you deliver more personalized service to the growing number of consumers who have food allergies or other specific dietary needs. By collecting and analyzing guest data, you can be reminded of a guest’s needs and preferences at the time of their order, which, in turn, can help you ensure their order is safe for them to eat, help your staff prepare it quickly without having to take time to confirm food sensitivities with the guest, and thereby drive guest satisfaction and loyalty. Across the foodservice industry, AI is impacting operators’ ability to pinpoint inefficiencies and make real-time adjustments. This year, look for the technology to help restaurants streamline menus during busy shifts – making it possible to focus on items that require less complicated preparation when a kitchen is at capacity or understaffed, according to TechHQ. In a similar vein, AI is allowing more restaurants to use dynamic pricing during peak periods so they can maximize the benefits of churning out orders at those times – or possibly encourage people to stagger those orders at off-peak hours. On the menu itself, AI can identify a restaurant’s most profitable items (or unprofitable items) and highlight the winners for guests in order to help drive more sales in that direction. AI has applications after the meal too: A recent Paytronix report says restaurants on its ordering platform will be able to use a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to automatically engage with guests after they finish their meal, then route their feedback to the store manager. Employee theft is a common problem in small- medium-size businesses. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 75 percent of employees have stolenhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-food-safety-matt-and-francines/id1673580302?i=1000639720769 from their employer at least once. It can be of particular concern in restaurants: One report estimates that quick-service restaurants, in particular, lose up to 7 percent of their sales to employee theft. There are plenty of ways for restaurant employees to steal from their employers – even if you are processing far fewer cash transactions than you used to. While the tech-based tools and systems you have adopted in recent years may not have been introduced for the purpose of identifying employee theft, they often provide that benefit by helping you get to the root of the problem more quickly and preventing theft from continuing. For example, a recent report from QSRweb.com says your tech-based systems for managing inventory and invoices can alert you to the theft of food and other supplies. Your POS may also help you detect voids, cancellations or other manipulations of your sales. At a time when loyalty programs are so widespread, your loyalty program can help you identify users who are generating more frequent discounts and reward points than would be legitimate. Informed use of security cameras can also discourage theft of cash and supplies. Of course, having a culture that is sensitive to the causes of employee theft can go far in preventing it, as can making staff aware of your policies in handling it if and when it happens. Over the past several years, restaurant operators have had to manage a delicate balancing act: Assess and adopt new technology to make business run more efficiently, but do so in a way that engages employees and guests and avoids alienating them. It’s a challenging task to handle when there is often little time in the midst of running a restaurant to sit back and consider the broader picture. As a result, operators may find themselves drowning in too much tech, losing the human touch with guests, and possibly turning off staff who assume they will be replaced by automation. If this sounds familiar, it may be time to reframe your business’s relationship to your tech, emphasizing that it’s not there to take over, but rather to provide a new level of background support that makes it possible for you to provide the best human support you can. A recent report from Modern Restaurant Management provides some suggestions. Think about what you want to provide for your guests – is it friendly service with a personal touch, or do people simply want their food fast so they can get on their way quickly? Build your tech strategy around that. When considering new tech tools or systems, involve your staff in choosing them, giving the people who will be using the tech an opportunity to test it out, ask questions and raise concerns. Then, when training staff on your tech, help them understand the “why” behind it by taking them through each step of the guest journey and demonstrating how the tech supports it. |
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