Artificial intelligence may already be supporting various tasks in your restaurant, from automating scheduling to monitoring inventory to personalizing staff training. But it can also serve as a self-contained brainstorming meeting of sorts by helping you develop new ideas that can keep your restaurant fresh for guests. For example, in recent months, chef Tom Aviv made headlines for using Dall-E, the image generator from OpenAI, to design the menu and décor for his restaurant Branja in Miami. One of the results was a chocolate mousse inspired by Picasso. Such uses of AI tools can help you formulate new recipes, identify different ingredient combinations, create engaging menu descriptions, and help you identify ways to bring your restaurant’s décor and online presence into better alignment with your brand. These tools need human intervention to generate the best results, but if you give them increasingly specific prompts, they can trigger new ideas in you that you can use to offer exciting experiences to guests. As you adopt new tech tools to gather data that helps you identify ways to improve your business, your methods of collecting guests’ personal information are evolving too. Some of this change is likely happening behind the scenes – perhaps the advertising vendor you’re planning to hire has a data protection policy that doesn’t quite align with your values, but that isn’t clear unless you scrutinize the fine print in your contract. If you can make it your practice to understand how your business will be processing guests’ data, what steps you’re taking to protect people’s personal information, how and where to post your policy, and how to discuss it with guests when asked, you can help ensure your guests will trust you with their information and be more willing to share it. Artificial intelligence may feel like one technology that’s more in the purview of larger, well-resourced brands than smaller ones, but increasingly, restaurants of all kinds are demonstrating how the technology can be helpful – and it doesn’t have to come at great expense. To be sure, AI is embedded in tech tools that help restaurants schedule staff and anticipate traffic flow. But a panel at the recent Fast Casual Executive Summit revealed that brands are experimenting with AI in a range of simpler ways that may make a difference to restaurants that haven’t already adopted a lot of tech. Your loyalty program, for instance, should use AI to help you pinpoint lapsed guests and target them with the right messages. Even using ChatGPT for free (or for a low subscription cost) may help you generate new ideas for hashtags in your social media posts, fine-tune job descriptions you can use to recruit staff, or come up with taglines to use in your online advertising. If you’ve been struggling to find a way to make delivery efficient and cost-effective, drone delivery is gradually and steadily gaining ground as an additional means of getting food to customers fast. Futuristic as it may still seem, a number of restaurant brands have been testing and launching the technology in limited areas. Nation’s Restaurant News reported that a Chick-fil-A in Austin, Texas is the latest among other Chick-fil-A stores to test the technology, and other brands include Jersey Mike’s, Freddy’s and Sweetgreen. At the Austin Chick-fil-A, the operators said the test of drone delivery was done to cut delivery costs and provide consistency. While the radius of the drone delivery is still small at under two miles, the response has been positive, with one customer saying their food arrived “super fast” and was “hot, perfect.” The influx of guest-facing tech tools can make it feel like restaurant staff have fewer opportunities to interact with guests and provide the kind of experience that brings them back. But these tools are meant to be resources to help them do a better job – not crutches to help them avoid the work. So if you’re using these guest-facing tech tools and they are lightening the load of your staff in various ways, be on the lookout for the people on your team who are finding ways to go out of their way to provide a great guest experience in other ways. Maybe that comes through in how they greet guests arriving or thanking regulars by name on the way out. Maybe it’s taking time to talk with guests and take care of extra requests when delivering their orders. Adopting these tech tools will call for developing staff differently – and for looking for new methods of delivering the service your guests expect from you. Use tech to manage guest events Does the prospect of hosting back-to-back events this holiday season leave you feeling nervous about managing all of the details? Or are you simply looking to offer more of these experiences in the future and need assistance on coordinating them? Event management software can help make the process more seamless. If you offer tickets to events, the software can help you sell tickets online, manage details about your bookings, and generate insights about your sales. Ideally, it should include functions that help you market, customize and digitally track details about your event promotions, as well as collect online payments securely. No doubt, we have seen significant development in the tools restaurants use to operate in recent years. But when it comes to restaurant categories, we haven’t seen much change in decades. However, according to Meredith Sandland and Carl Orsbourn, restaurant experts and authors of “The Path to Digital Maturity,” there is a new restaurant category emerging: the digitally native restaurant. This is a combination of ghost kitchens, virtual brands, automation, robotics and delivery fulfillment that is optimized for off-premise sales. They believe that once operators find the right approach to this kind of restaurant, the category will grow faster than the rest of the industry. There are a number of restaurant brands that are already testing the waters here, but for the rest, the possibilities of an emerging digitally native restaurant category are likely to change consumer expectations about speed, efficiency and customization everywhere – and necessitate the technology that helps operators deliver on those benefits. Using your tech stack, can you pull information about what your guests are buying, how often, if and when they return, if they buy items on special, how they modify their orders, and which channels they use? How accurately does that inform how much food you make on a given day? Contactless payment has been on the rise in restaurants in recent years – and it still has room to grow. According to Jupiter Research, approximately 53 percent of global transactions are likely to be contactless within the next few years. As this report from Modern Restaurant Management indicates, the hotel sector has made contactless check-in and check-out a normal part of a stay – and this can extend to restaurants as well. How much friction is there to your payment process? Can guests pay when they want and easily add items to their order – without feeling hounded by a server to finish their meal or stranded when they’re ready to leave but haven’t yet seen their bill? Smoothing out this aspect of the guest experience can help remove some of the stress around it (for guest and server alike), simplify the experience you provide and give guests a greater sense of independence. The speed with which artificial intelligence has become an everyday tool in our lives can leave people both excited about its potential and wary of its risks. The same is true about the use of AI in restaurant operations. If your staff is stuck somewhere between wanting to embrace it and resisting it, help them separate fact from fiction. AI can support your restaurant by helping your managers create more efficient schedules, predict sales and facilitate communication among staff. What AI can’t do is replace human roles – it’s more about streamlining tedious tasks within a restaurant, reducing errors and freeing up time for staff to serve guests. More broadly, its integration with a restaurant’s existing POS can help operators more readily connect the dots between their data sources and make key decisions that will help optimize the business. There is no doubt that AI will play a key role in the development of the industry, so it’s important to embrace its applications – but it still requires people to monitor it as they use it to make decisions. Much as some consumers – and restaurant operators – might worry that technology is gradually replacing the human touch in restaurants, the businesses that can find the sweet spot between tech and human connection are in a powerful place. They not only know how to provide great service, but they also know what specific messages have the best chance of connecting with guests and motivating them to visit repeatedly. This recent Fast Company interview with restaurateur Danny Meyer demonstrates what can happen when that is missing: Meyer shared a story about an occasion when his restaurants sent out a mass email to all customers on their list. At the time, the restaurants were trying to fill tables during a snowstorm, and the email invited guests to bring their own bottles of wine to the restaurant and have them served with no corkage fee. But for the email recipients who didn’t drink alcohol, the message did not connect (at best) and in some cases even caused offense. Imagine how that attempt at engagement might have gone differently if the message about wine was directed to just the wine connoisseurs in their guest database, and separate offers were sent to similarly specific segments of guests. They would have ensured that the guests who responded to the offers were primed to have a good experience there. Just as importantly, they would have avoided turning off a guest who had already bought into their brand and willingly shared their email address, thinking the restaurant was a business who understood their preferences. Do the systems you have in place help you create the kinds of offers that connect with guests and make them feel understood? |
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