Bringing your restaurant to the future era of dining
The pandemic has changed almost every aspect of our daily lives—the way we now communicate, the way we shop and most importantly, the way we dine. More and more of today’s customers demand a digital offering from all tiers of the restaurant industry, from quick service to fine dining. Customers, especially millennials want their food in the similar seamless manner they are used to from brands like Amazon or Netflix. As consumers get accustomed to these types of technology in everyday life, they will expect to encounter them in restaurants.
There is though, a divide that needs to be crossed. Some argue that technology is destroying the ‘human factor’ in service, while others blame restaurants as hiding behind ‘service delivery’ to avoid investing in digital touch -points. Often, the customer experience can be improved with digital tech, not ruined – when applied properly. Clearly, the approach to service is changing shape and restaurants will have to adapt to the morphing scenario or fall behind.
Traditionally, wait staff would walk to and from tables, scribbling orders onto a notepad. The frequency of this repetitive task intensifies as the restaurant gets busy. Order taking takes place after the guest is already seated and the food (and beverages) menu/s is handed out. The waiter takes down the order, makes suggestions, repeats the order and informs the diner about the expected time of the order delivery, before leaving the guest table to trudge over to the kitchen to place the order. In between, the server would pop into the kitchen several times to check and/or collect the prepared food from the pass.
Restaurants that operate partly-digitized- i.e. with a Point of Sale (POS) system, require staff to only return to the ‘POS till’,(more often than not installed at the other end of the dining room), to punch the orders in and send all from one place. It eliminates the need for pen-paper tickets (Kitchen Order Ticket) for order taking. However, in the majority of cases, the system is a one-way street - only delivering information to the kitchen, about meals to do. Apart from that, all other forms of communication remain purely offline.
Take menu cards and I mean the whole lot; the grossly oversized a la carte ones, the glossy inexpensive ones, the dog-eared and stained ones – will they be all dead? Will the practice of running one’s fingers down the items on offer, calling the attention of the server and verbally giving one’s order, be a ritual of the past? Maybe not…but things are changing gradually and customers’ interaction in restaurants is going to be different – eventually!
The fast food industry has already bitten into digital menus including McDonald’s with its self-ordering kiosks since 2017 and Burger King which has led the way with digital menu screens since over a decade ago.
At the height of the pandemic, restaurants did away with menu cards, affixing instead, QR codes on the tables. The diner scans it with his/her phone which then brings up the restaurant menu. Diners then select the food dishes displayed and verbally place the order with the server. QR code menus require no upfront investment because the screen is the user’s mobile.
Going a step further, other restaurants provide diners the option to add the dishes they want to the cart with their table number. They then enter their payment information, submit payment, and their order is sent to the kitchen. Research reveals that people add more to their cart on a device or computer than when speaking to a human.
Need help? Use the server app. The mobile app allows guests and kitchen staff to summon the waiter/waitress with a tap on the screen. A single tap will call the server to the table. Kitchen staff too, can call servers for serving the food once they are cooked.
In an industry defined by tight margins and soaring overheads, the potential of technology-based alternatives to the menu card are enormous – but not without pitfalls. Digitisation of menus leads to self-service and the fear of making servers redundant. Maybe entirely not, servers will continue to seat guests, serve food and clear tables. Incidentally, Hilton is experimenting with a robot that can serve food to diners in the restaurant.
It is likely that every restaurant will not abandon the menu card nor are they going to see the benefit to fork out money on new technology. For the big guns though, the imperative to innovate will be a key driver of adoption in the industry.
As someone said “Future generations will someday only hear stories about the days when the server had to do it ALL and not be able to fathom what that must have been like.”
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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