A study performed by Cornell University for recent hospitality research has discovered that restaurant customers virtual menus with nutritional information to be most beneficial out of all recent restaurant technology. These restaurant goers also believe that online reservations, kiosk ordering, and pagers for seating are also important aspects to the recent restaurant technology. This report, Customer Preferences for Restaurant Technology Innovations, examined eleven different restaurant technology tools and evaluated the customer’s perceived value and acceptance of the eleven tools.
These findings included online reservation systems and pagers are most common, few restaurants use cell-phone payment systems, consumers who use technology in restaurants consider it more valuable than those who haven’t tried it, and restaurants consumers seem to prefer technology like pagers and virtual menus since it adds to convenience in early stages of service.
This study encourages restaurants to use more technology but also persuade the customers to try these new tools of technology in restaurants. However, restaurants shouldn’t force the customers to use the recent technology and not to implement extremely difficult technologies.
This article also lists how technology cannot only benefit the restaurant but also the consumer. Since technology improves convenience by saving time in ordering for the consumer but benefit servers turning over more tables to increase the company’s profit as well as the servers tips. The customer may benefit by feeling more in control by making their own reservation or even stepping away to walk around while you wait by them paging your cell phone. Technology can benefit the operators by cutting labor cost and also attract new and more customers.
Technology benefits everyone in this industry from consumers to the operators. We all know that it can benefit the food service industry by increasing profit by having new customers and by decreasing our labor cost. Technology is an interesting thing but how much is too much? We all know that we initially go out to eat to have an experience now it seems to be turning into no service just technology. I believe some aspects of technology are needed in all restaurants like pagers when the restaurant is on a wait but it depends on where you choose to dine out. If I go to a fine dining restaurant I do not expect to make a reservation online, to be handed a pager, or to be handed a virtual menu since it is all about the ultimate guest experience. However, if I dine at a chain I would expect these things. I think that having a virtual menu with all nutrition information is very impressive and a great thing to have a restaurant and will probably help with the nutrition aspect of restaurants. Technology improves the foodservice business but shouldn’t be offered in all aspects of foodservice.
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Jill makes a good point, it depends on where you eat and what kind of technology is appropriate for the kind of restaurant. I don't think I would pay for something using my cell phone just for security reasons. I also think that in certain circumstances having alot of technology such as a virtual menu won't also save time. If you have guests that aren't good with technology it could take awhile for them to start to understand the process and you will have to have people there to help them start.
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