As you look for ways to make more informed business decisions this year, the data you have on hand will provide a window onto what needs attention – and where you can make the greatest strides. To help, a recent report from Nation’s Restaurant News Intelligence advises operators to add a digital aspect to as many parts of the business as possible – and to aim to ensure the information you collect is complete and provides some nuanced detail about a guest. (For example, the brands that have the best handle on guest data tend to know more than just the person’s basic demographics – they seek to understand the person’s lifetime value, spending habits, order histories and preferred payment method.) Regardless of the kind of restaurant you operate, are there opportunities for you to digitize more transactions, enhance your loyalty program to gather more information on what your guests enjoy, connect every sale to a known guest, and engage guests in more targeted ways? Looking for ways to gather more and better information will help you make the kinds of decisions that can help drive your business forward. Whether you’re looking to slim down your tech stack this year or integrate new tools, your technology is likely to be the nerve center of your business going forward. Your ability to harness it and have your staff using its full functionality will be critical to managing your business in real time and course-correcting as needed. At a recent Fast Casual Executive Summit, restaurant leaders shared their thoughts about using technology to the greatest advantage. Eric Knott, COO at PDQ Restaurants, emphasized the need for employees beyond the tech team or restaurant leadership to be involved in selecting, testing and determining the need for new tech. "Anytime we evaluate any technology, we bring in a resource group of individuals from the organization to weigh in and get opinions,” he said. “That could be a cashier, somebody that works the drive thru, a store manager. So we have a good group of opinions on how it touches each of them.” These representatives can help you appreciate the nuances of integrating new tech with your service model and what functions are more important to solving existing problems. Beyond that, they can also make for helpful ambassadors and potential trainers of the tech down the line when you’re trying to increase buy-in across your team. Consumers want restaurant delivery – and not only on cold winter nights. According to research from Statista, the online food delivery market in the U.S. is projected to grow more than 13 percent annually in the next few years, reaching a projected market volume of $534 billion by 2028. It’s a good time to make sure your restaurant’s delivery mechanism works as smoothly as it can and offers guests the convenience they demand as you adopt new technology or consider taking on new delivery partners. Looking at your current delivery capabilities, are you able to rely on your system to deliver a consistent and positive experience to guests? Can your system easily scale up as your business changes and grows? Does it meet your budget constraints? Can it help you respond to order inquiries promptly and accurately? Do its features reflect the features available through your third-party delivery partners or do you need to compromise in certain areas? Do you feel that your system empowers you to act on in-the-moment decisions as business conditions warrant? For example, if you want to update a menu item, offer a limited-time promotion, or turn your delivery availability on or off, can you make a change in an easy, agile move? As you set out to preserve or build your delivery business this year, consider what goals you want it to help you achieve. Make sure you and your team understand and can use its full functionality. Where possible, adapt existing processes so you operate with leaner technology. Finally, review your progress on a regular basis so you can course-correct as needed. 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? |
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