There are certain service tasks in your restaurant that can easily be delegated, allowing you to provide better service (and with fewer staff) as a result. Maybe you have a website with a lot of functionality that serves as a hub for multiple business streams. Or you’re spending too much time answering the same questions from guests. Are you leaning into your technology to help guide people through your website and answer common questions? Can you automate the processing of orders from guests through a kitchen display system and allow for detailed modifications – all while minimizing errors and bottlenecks? Can you quickly direct targeted promotions to multiple segments of guests? Using technology in these ways can help you “set and forget” certain repetitive tasks so you can spend more time where it matters – in front of your guests and developing the kinds of offers they are craving. As the capabilities of automation continue to spread across restaurant kitchens and their broader operations, many businesses may be in the position of not being able to make near-term changes due to cost constraints or simply because it can be difficult to let go of certain tasks that have long been done a different way. Fortunately, in an industry that’s built around data, there are plenty of data-driven examples demonstrating how automation is transforming various restaurant tasks – and quick-service restaurants will likely be the ones showing the industry how it’s done. A survey of operators by PYMNTS found that QSR operators plan to automate nearly half of all store tasks over the next two years, while full-service restaurants plan to automate just one-quarter of these tasks. It will be worth tracking the growth trajectories of various restaurant categories in the coming years to see where investments in automation are paying off – or not. Only 37 percent of consumers agree that more technology inside of restaurants means better customer service. That’s according to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of more than 2,200 U.S. consumers conducted last year. That doesn’t mean that technology isn’t delivering better service – just that the guest-facing applications don’t necessarily make that clear to guests. So focus on using tech to operate as efficiently as possible behind the scenes – to keep guests’ favorite menu items in stock, automate repetitive tasks that occupy your staff’s time, and prioritize line prep tasks so your staff can effectively balance competing streams of orders. The better you can manage demand in the kitchen, the more time your staff will have to spend in the dining room with guests, making sure their experience feels like a positive one. When deciding where to invest in technology improvements, it makes sense to focus on the back of the house first. Once you have support with employee scheduling, inventory management and other operational functions, your staff should have more time to deliver positive experiences for guests (which also helps them feel more positive about their jobs). This is the approach that Domino’s – long a trendsetter in the restaurant tech space – is taking with their embrace of new AI tools the brand is developing in partnership with Microsoft Cloud and Azure OpenAI Service. According to a recent report from Nation’s Restaurant News, Domino’s is working on a generative AI assistant to support employees and personalize customer service, with special focus on invisible back-of-house technology. The brand’s chief technology officer said she believes helping the team access information and make decisions more quickly can help them respond more promptly and effectively when mistakes are made. This makes people’s jobs easier to do – and will likely trickle into the front of the house in the form of shorter order times, fewer mistakes and a better overall experience. It’s worth bearing in mind as you consider tech priorities, regardless of whether you’re implementing generative AI or not. If you’re looking for ways to manage high guest demand and unsteady labor with the help of technology, brands are offering new examples of how it can be done – or at least how they are approaching it based on the popularity of different menu items. Take Chipotle, which recently introduced a test of an automated digital makeline in collaboration with Hyphen, a foodservice platform that helps automate kitchen operations. A Fast Casual report says the brand will be using the automated makeline for digital orders of its bowls and salads, which comprise 65 percent of its business. Each dish travels along the makeline as an intelligent dispenser releases the desired ingredients. When the item arrives at the end of the makeline, a staff member places a lid on the dish and adds any final requested items to the order. The goal is to free up employees for other tasks and increase capacity for (and accuracy of) digital orders. It’s easy to see how this might help a restaurant better adapt to employee absences as well. Looking at your menu, are there certain dishes that make up a large portion of your sales and would be easy to automate? We have all been there: It’s been a long day, you’re hungry, you’re craving a meal from a favorite restaurant, and you want it here now. Somehow the effort it takes to order or adjust a past order to your preferences – never mind collect orders from others – feels like more than you want to manage. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could skip that first part and allow the restaurant to get a jump start on preparing your dish? This functionality is something that Panera is offering their loyalty club members. The new feature, dubbed Crunch Time Ordering, allows guests to pre-program their favorite meals into their app and set them to be ordered at a set date and time. The app sends the person a reminder to place the order for pickup or delivery, then they just need to swipe a prompt within the app to complete the process. This kind of functionality is something to consider if you serve craveable foods that your guests think about at certain times of the week – like a large coffee on the way to work, a soup-and-sandwich combo for lunch during a busy work day, or a Friday-night pizza to kick off the weekend. Looking at your guests’ ordering habits and the preferences of your most loyal fans, are there ways you can remove friction from your ordering process and make it a little easier for people to get the food they crave? Is there room for you to remove manual processes from your inventory management? Adopting an automated inventory management system that integrates with your POS can help your business more quickly identify problems that waste resources. You can remove human error from the ordering process, forecast your needs more accurately, lower your food costs, and more quickly pinpoint where you’re experiencing product theft, breakage, spoilage or other waste. Having real-time information at your fingertips simply makes you nimble. As this report from Restaurant Technology News indicates, these tools help you monitor stock levels and their corresponding value in real time, which helps you calculate recipe costs and ensure you’re offering a profitable combination of items as you swap ingredients in and out. Perhaps you have a shift in your restaurant that no staff want to work – a major holiday approaching, a long weekend, or a particular day of the week when you anticipate higher guest traffic and want to have sufficient staff on hand to accommodate it. If you offered surge pricing around that shift, would it change your employees’ minds? Much like how operators are using surge pricing on digital menus to boost profits when guest traffic is high, they can also use workforce management tech to make less-appealing shifts more profitable (and therefore more desirable) for employees. If that tech can also help employees get paid automatically following a shift, even better. As you compete for staff and try to retain your best people, the technology you use to make their experience with you smoother and more profitable can mean the difference between attracting and keeping a new employee and losing that person to the restaurant across the street. What improvements could you make? Recruiting and retaining staff is challenging enough on its own right now – but it becomes all the more difficult if you’re still using manual processes to manage it. Are there manual processes you could stand to weed out of your operation? A recent webinar from SmartBrief about workforce engagement tools for the hospitality industry described the benefits of a tech-based alternative. Consider this: A person who is already passionate about your brand comes in to pick up an order. They see an in-store (or perhaps an in-app) sign advertising open positions. With the scan of a QR code, they access an application, which is streamed differently depending on the responsibilities of their desired position. They apply quickly, with a minimum of scanning and scrolling. After a successful interview, they complete all necessary forms online on their own time – and avoid wasting time in the restaurant prior to starting work or having to distract the manager on duty with questions. On the person’s first day of work, your restaurant’s app sends them a message explaining what it’s like to work in your organization. Over the next few months, it continues to check in to ask about training and point out ways to easily get information, swap shifts or ask for time off, and connect with other people. It can send out pulse surveys to get an ongoing read on how the person is doing and where concerns could be lurking. If the person clocks in late a few times in a row, your app can alert a busy manager, who can then make an effort to understand where there might be a problem and offer support. Down the line, it can send out messages or little rewards on birthdays and work anniversaries. Could this help you? Consider the snags in your recruitment and retention processes. Are you mired in any time-consuming paperwork? Is it difficult for your managers to monitor every employee’s performance and anticipate who is struggling? Do you know which staff are disengaged? There are tools to help you smooth out these bumps – and they may help you not only reach good potential staff, but also stand a better chance of holding on to them for longer. New research from Deloitte suggests that many diners are open to eating in restaurants that use labor-saving devices or other technological automation – with 58 percent of consumers aged 18-38 saying they’d return to restaurants that use automation, compared to 42 percent of customers over the age of 39. Keep in mind that automation need not mean bringing in robotic cooks or servers, or even making eye-watering financial investments. Restaurants are approaching automation in a wide range of ways – in the back and front of house, both food-facing and not. A recent podcast from The Spoon shared the story of how pizza restaurant owner Andrew Simmons began adopting automation in a piecemeal way to sustain his brand when the pandemic hit – and how he now plans to launch a 100-unit restaurant chain built using off-the-shelf restaurant technology. Consider what your guests value most about your brand – and how automating even small tasks might help you elevate what you do best and minimize the things that can stand in your way. |
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