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Whether you’re running a local bakery with your grandma’s secret cupcake recipe winning over the neighbors’ hearts for decades or you’re managing a chain of upscale restaurants where a critic could walk in at any moment – innovation is the driving force of your success. Even with those unchanged recipes and intact global reputations, restaurants, bistros, cafés, pastry shops, they all need to recognize when certain new solutions can help them preserve their humanly essence and take their establishment to the next level of success.
Enter technology. From digital marketing solutions, all the way to inventory management and food quality assurance, tech has become the stepping stone to brand positioning as well as better customer service. No matter what kind of a hospitality business you’re running, you could use the immense potential that tech brings to the table. Here are a few trends that will reign supreme in 2020, that can help you improve your operations every day.
Ordering and home delivery made simpler
Modern-day customers lead hectic lives, but they still don’t want to forego the luxurious restaurant experience, so they like to bring it home with them. How? By ordering takeout, of course, but this is no longer a practice limited to fast-food chains, but to upscale establishments, too. With the help of digital platforms relevant to your location, such as Uber Eats, fine dining no longer has to be exclusively limited to your restaurant.
Of course, there’s another factor to think of: your cybersecurity. If your clients and customers leave their most sensitive data such as credit card information, name, and addresses with your platform, you also need to make sure that your website, as well as your security, is up to the task of online order management.
Tech-driven tableside service
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Saving time without rushing your waiters, focusing on the customer without abandoning the perks of tech, and impressing your guests is all possible with a single potent solution: point-of-sale tech. These systems are considered a true godsend for restaurants that deal with high volume visits and that have a wide range of offers on their menus.
To make things even more innovative, restaurants can now rely on a mobile pos system that allows their wait staff to bring the entire menu in the palm of their hand and offer a range of payment options to their customers directly. Such a simple solution takes the hassle out of the entire ordering cycle and prevents mistakes often made by staff when they need to tend to many guests over the course of a day.
Taking reservations and scheduling with ease
Logistics can be quite complex for any hospitality business, restaurants in particular. Taking reservations by phone is a tradition that stands the test of time for most established businesses, but with expansion and multiple locations to deal with, the issues of such a system begin to multiply. Now, restaurants can use digital reservation managers that have been designed to prevent overbooking, help customers pick the perfect seating arrangement, and send out notifications for customers waiting for their table to be ready.
Training and staff education
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Your employees are your greatest assets, and as such, they need to benefit from your tech innovations, too. Luckily for you and your entire staff, implementing online training programs has become a breeze with dedicated platforms that select the most relevant and effective courses for your team. No matter if you need your barista to learn new coffee hacks or your wait staff needs to brush up their serving skills, digital education is the latest trend to help hospitality businesses improve their service.
Recycling for mindful restaurant owners
We live in a world where waste is practically an everyday occurrence. Only in recent years have we achieved greater awareness of the issues our wasteful behavior has caused, so businesses, as well as individuals, now look for smarter ways to reduce waste and avoid landfills. In the hospitality industry, and in restaurant businesses, in particular, avoiding food waste has become a top priority. Cutting-edge technology can be of help here, too.
From smarter waste disposal, all the way to better ways to recycle and manage waste, these latest solutions rely on scientific research to ensure energy efficiency, reduced fuel usage, and better ways to deal with organic waste coming from restaurants. Apps and systems are now easily embedded into existing restaurant operations to enable better recycling processes and lead the way in greener, eco-friendlier practices.
Although there will not be a single industry out there unaffected by the tech revolution, it’s safe to say that hospitality businesses will see an increase in the use of tech to stay relevant. In case you’d like your restaurant to work more smoothly and benefit from all these cutting-edge solutions, it’s time to enter the New Year armed with tech to serve your customers even better than before.
