5 Restaurant Technologies to Watch
By Taylor Moore from TouchBistro
View the full article at cayan.com
In the restaurant industry, there’s an innovation for just about everything you can think of. From managing wait lists, to selling lunchtime leftovers, to gamifying the dining experience, we’re at the point where you might find yourself saying, “Of course, there’s an app for that.”
That said, not all restaurant tech is created equal or should take top priority. In this post, we’ll look at five emerging restaurant technologies you should keep your eye on this year.
1. Portable Payments
That said, not all restaurant tech is created equal or should take top priority. In this post, we’ll look at five emerging restaurant technologies you should keep your eye on this year.
While mobile payments like Apple Pay and Google Wallet were all the rage in trend reports last, this year it’s all about bringing the payment to the guest. This all harkens back to the “boutique” model that many businesses and restaurants are moving back to. It’s a model that prioritizes the guest’s personalized experience and focuses on a server’s ability to romance the patrons, even during traditionally banal parts of the dining experience like payment processing
2. One-for-All Technology
Wait list apps, customer engagement, scheduling apps, inventory management tools … the list goes on … food pick up, food delivery, food donation … and on. All this tech is great, but it’s a whole lot to juggle and eventually one of those balls is going to drop. In other words, more technology, more problems. When systems don’t speak the same language, restaurants end up with siloed processes, and all the data these apps collect becomes fragmented and unmatched, and therefore, unusable. The ability to report, make sense of and understand trends is compromised.
3. Self-Ordering: Kiosks and Table Side Tablets
With the proliferation of quick-service restaurants and delivery and take out apps, it only makes sense that we’d begin to see self-ordering emerge as a tech trend. Take-out and pick-up apps are abounding, and they’re making businesses money, not just because they’re making food more accessible but because they’re automating the upsell. When restaurants give customers themselves the option on a screen to make modifications and enhancements and choose add ons, they’re actually doing it…and those little customizations are adding up. According to the Harvard Business Review, Taco Bell announced that, “orders made via their new digital app are 20% pricier than those taken by human cashiers, largely because people select additional ingredients.”
4. Wearable Tech
Right alongside the tableside tablet movement is the push towards wearable tech, which is about more than just counting steps. Smart, wearable hospitality technology notifies servers when someone has come through the front doors, when they’ve been sat or when an order is ready for delivery. When connected to tableside tablets, guests can make requests to their server even when they’re not right at the table. Wearable tech presents a happy medium of technology and in-person service, where servers aren’t replaced by a kiosk.
5. Real-Time Data Automation
Data automation is the next frontier for restaurants. With a combination of live numbers, historical data and reporting mechanisms that automatically populate and trend data, restaurateurs and managers can make better, faster decisions in all aspects of their restaurant from ordering produce, to scheduling, to projecting revenues and making upgrades.
View the full article at cayan.com
Don Bregin
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