Imagine this: You’re driving the family to Grandma’s lake house for summer vacation. After six hours on the highway, the kids are rowdy and hungry, so you take the next exit to grab a quick bite. The chicken sandwich chain’s crowded drive-thru is 15-cars deep, but before you can throw the car in reverse and go looking for quicker options, a smiling employee armed with a tablet taps your window to take your order, adding a friendly question about your travels. Five minutes later, your order is at the pickup window, the sandwiches are hot and tasty and there’s a little bonus cookie in the bag with a note telling you to have a great time fishing.
What could have been a headache of long waits, wrong orders and impersonal service became a lesson in great hospitality. Top-notch service, empowered by digital technology, turned it into an opportunity to deliver a game-changing experience.
Few industries are as much about customer experience as the restaurant business—the speed, efficiency and convenience of fast food, the “choose your own toppings” customization of high-growth fast casual chains, or the way the waitress at your local diner knows your breakfast order. Every person who goes out to eat knows the benefit of being made to feel special, and restaurants of all kinds are turning to digital technologies in the move from slinging hash to delivering incomparable experiences.
Tracking your pizza
How important is customer experience for restaurants? According to Hospitality Technology’s 2017 Restaurant Technology Study, improving digital customer engagement is the number one strategic priority of food service companies, unseating “efficiency” for the first time in a decade. Over 60 percent of food operators said they’re focusing on digital innovation this year.
At the recent Adobe Summit, Brad Rencher, EVP and general manager for digital marketing at Adobe, defined experience as the sum of all the interactions a person has with a brand. “Companies that have tuned into making people feel special are completely disrupting the status quo,” he said. “Making experience your business is good for business.”
He went on to identify Domino’s as an experience business because of the way it has upended getting a pizza delivered. People can order with an app, through a Facebook Messenger bot, by tweeting an emoji or even go old school and call it in. They can then use the mobile app to keep track of when their pizza is in the oven or how far away the delivery guy is. In fact, Domino’s now gets 60 percent of orders via the app, and it is constantly looking to improve the experience.
A new way to order
And they’re not alone. The entire quick-service restaurant segment—or QSR, the industry term for fast food—is revitalizing the experience, as is its upmarket cousin “fast casual.” Pizza Hut made a splash during this year’s March Madness with a special set of “Pie Top” sneakers that could be used to order a pizza. Chili’s now has payment and ordering through tableside tablets. And Subway launched a 150-person digital team to update its guest experience with real, data-driven personalization.
“No more one size fits all,” Subway’s chief digital officer Carman Wenkoff told QSR Magazine. “We’ll leverage what we know about each customer to deliver individual experiences.”
Even McDonald’s is shaking things up. In March, the Golden Arches announced an app diners could use to place orders for curbside or drive-thru pick-up and built in-store kiosks that could access customers’ app profiles containing their customized orders and payment methods. Say goodbye to the endless wait for a Big Mac without onions.
“The whole experience is to make customers’ lives easier, more convenient, more enjoyable,” McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook said at the time. “It’s not meant to be life changing. It’s just meant to modernize and evolve the McDonald’s experience just to make us a better McDonald’s.”
Fine dining
A great experience was an essential part of fine dining long before technology entered the kitchen.
Union Square Café has been one of New York’s premier restaurants for over three decades, renowned as much for its superior service as for its great food. Today, managers and sommeliers at the restaurant—which just moved to a new location–all wear an Apple Watch. It’s not to take orders or look cool. Rather, when a VIP walks through the door, when a bottle of wine is ordered, or when a menu item runs out, every manager gets an alert via the computer on their wrist.
Technology becomes another way to streamline some of the time-consuming functions of the restaurant. Communications on the floor are improved—the sommelier can be quickly alerted when a bottle of wine is ordered; the coat room can be pinged when a check is being paid so diners don’t have to wait on the way out.
The Union Square system is built by Resy, whose reservation app (like OpenTable) also provides ways for the restaurant to delight its customers. The app lets customer’s preferences be passed along to the server, so they know ahead of time if the person may have dietary preferences or likes to order a specific drink. This information originally lived in the reservation book upfront and was mostly for “regulars,” but is now available for every diner.
Technology isn’t going to replace a great server or a great chef. And it’s not going to make your hamburger taste better or keep your pizza from burning the roof of your mouth. But it is going to catapult restaurants into a future where providing an authentic, personalized experience is your key differentiator. That’s something all businesses can chew on.
