Great food, a pleasant atmosphere, and high-grade service are essential things for a positive experience to get at the restaurants. Yet, you’d stay current to stay competitive. According to the research, 95% of restaurateurs agree that the technologies implemented improved the efficiency of their business. So, if you realize the importance of digital transformation for your restaurant business, but don’t know where to start, then this article is here to help you.
6 Ways Technology Creates Unforgettable Customer Experience in Your Restaurant
Here we explore the 6 high technologies to implement for improving customer experience in the restaurant and help you to accommodate any of your clients’ preferences. Let’s elaborate on these 6 ways to drive your business.
Use Digital Menu Boards
Living in an era when everything becomes digital, tabletop tablets in restaurants go mainstream. And that’s for a good reason. Using digital menu boards, the restaurant allows its guests to look into the offers, and make and send orders to the kitchen without a wait staff involved. That results in:
- the faster table turnovers, because orders come out much more quickly;
- enhanced customer engagement;
- increase average check;
- racked up the accuracy of the orders with no chances for manual errors;
- happier and satisfied guests.
The technology doesn’t replace the human staff, only enhances it. Thus, your employees can focus on engaging with guests, making their time even more pleasant.
What’s more, digital menu boards are your rescue from the nightmare of updating the menu when dealing with the old-fashioned hardcopy stationeries. Yes, now you just replace the needed content, and voila! Guests are aware of all the updates and new dishes. The smart technology is bound to ramp up the quality of the guests’ experience, build a loyalty brand, drive personalized experiences, and lead to more mouth-of-word recommendations.
Provide Online Reservations
Do you know that 33% of consumers prefer to make a reservation using high technologies like chatbots than interact with an employee? What’s more, there is a growing tendency towards digitalization. Only by digitizing the process of table reservation can you get a win-win situation for both sides – restaurateurs and clients. Thus, restaurants can:
- track and manage bookings more efficiently;
- gather and operate the guest information via a single interface;
- enhance the customer base.
Online reservations lead to improved customer experience too. The consumers will get the ability to check the available seats, book the tables online in advance, mention the date and time of the visit, and even make a pre-order. In such a way, you and your employees can focus on driving the revenue.
Use Bill Splitting Technology
Currently, 81% of restaurants use POS technologies. You can integrate the digital Point of Sale systems with tabletop tablets so the guests can look through a digital menu, place orders, and even pay themselves. Robust POS technologies offer lots of advantages, including:
- Flexible payment options such as accepting cash, credit/gift cards, checks, EMV, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, etc.
- Retention of both visitors and employees by providing up-to-date services that reduce stress for staff and enhance the guests’ experience.
- Speeding up checkout by letting guests pay at their convenience on their mobile device as well as splitting the bills.
In the latter case, when dealing with big groups of visitors, large bills can be split among guests.
Don’t panic; there is a way to keep the guests’ experience positive as well as painless from the very beginning up to paying the dinner bill. Implement POS software for your restaurant that will help you to split the check in the right way:
- Split checks by a seat. It’s critical when your restaurant has an inflow of visitors who come in large groups. Make sure that the wait staff can do that in one click with the ability to add changes like merging seats when the guests pay together, for example.
- Split checks by amount. It’s a crucial feature when a group of guests orders something to share with the table, for instance.
- Split checks by item. The clients can order a drink/appetizer for a single seat or several seats, and the staff should have the ability to move the specific item to the correct diner bill.
Implement Self-service Kiosks
Nowadays, people prefer introvertive-like services. Yes, at least 29% of customers would like to pay a bill using the technologies without human help. Self-service kiosks are a fresh trend that gains popularity in fast food chains like McDonald’s. Yet, it’s a good idea to implement the tech in the restaurant service as well. The main perks of this restaurant technology are:
- optimization of customer-employee interactions;
- improvement of the menu options;
- upsell the money-making items;
- elimination of human error.
Typically, self-service kiosks come in the form of big touch screens and sometimes tablets. Using the in-house digital ordering systems, your guests can make an order for themselves and make a payment without ever having interacted with your staff. Implementing restaurant technology is essential for improving your service and customer experience.
Partner with Third-party Food Delivery Services
Today people more often order food delivery instead of dining-in or carryout. According to Restaurant Business, 21% of consumers prefer delivery orders, and that percentage goes up to 30% when it comes to clients aged 18 to 34. Besides, 44% of all restaurant sales come from off-premise sales, and delivery takes 25% of all off-premise orders. That’s the very reason to think about having a delivery service.
It’s where restaurant owners are facing a tough decision: is it better to invest in developing their own delivery channel or sign up with a third-party service? There are several weighty reasons why the latter variant is better:
- no need for teaching and training delivery staff;
- no necessity for delivery bags, or transportation;
- fewer order mistakes;
- draw new clients;
- integrated orders with your POS.
What’s more, there are lots of services like DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub, and others that have strong reputations and provide the service in different countries that it’s crucial for international restaurant chains. All you have to do is choose the service to co-work with and get increased revenue.
Deliver Free WiFi
It’s so simple, but so a sure way to get higher sales revenue. You can hardly imagine your customers without a smartphone in their hands. That’s why free WiFi delivered is a way to entertain the guests while they wait for the order, for example.
What’s more, that’s how to attract people to visit the restaurant with consistency and keep them coming back. Another great option is giving free WiFi to gather WiFi data and use it for marketing purposes. Herewith, offering free WiFi isn’t obligatory, but it’s nice to have.
However, there is one necessary caution: it’s better to deliver WiFi by using only a credible service provider to be sure of the quality of the connection. Otherwise, your clients can feel irritated, which will result in a poor experience.
Bottom Line
Living in a high-tech era, it’s vital to digitize your restaurant with current technology and features in your restaurant management system to stay competitive with guest retention and to attract new visitors. Today’s customers become more and more demanding and require significant attention, accuracy, speed, engagement, entertainment, personalized service, etc.
Cutting-edge technologies implemented are bound to help you to enhance customer experience, ease restaurant management, and even save your costs. These six ways described in the article are not only necessary but important ones for improving your service. Therefore, the restaurants should increase their capability to leverage digital technologies to improve their service, drive personalized experience, and boost sales revenue.
