 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).
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