Refine Your Restaurant Tech Stack
With so much flux in hospitality, it’s rare to get a chance to scan the environment and assess where to focus. It’s a complicated balancing act:
- contactless technology versus the human touch
- tackling labor shortages while maintaining service levels
- investing in online ordering and digital marketing versus the tried and true
Our recent webinar: This is an Intervention: It’s Time to Refine Your Tech Stack”, tackles these important questions, while giving operators a chance to learn from experts in hospitality operations and digital business strategy. A recording is available.
Guest Panelists
- Meredith Sandland, Author of Delivering the Digital Restaurant, Fortune 500 Executive, Board Member & Advisor
- Michael L. Atkinson, ResTech Investor, Advisor and Entrepreneur
- Terrence Gordon, Founding President, FOHBOH
- Rolf Gehrung, SVP of Sales, GoTab
Webinar Highlights
What Does it Mean to be a Digital Restaurant?
Meredith defined the digital restaurant as a restaurant that operates wherever a consumer wants to be. For an entire generation of people, starting with Gen Z (including many millennials), if they have to talk to a human, they consider that interaction a failure; i.e., something has gone wrong with the process. They’d much rather interact with their phone or a kiosk. If they have to stand in line, they’re annoyed. And while many believe we’re so early in this change in restaurants, it doesn’t apply to hospitality. Restaurants that don’t make an effort to respond to this inevitable shift in consumer expectations will be left behind.
What’s Most Important When it Comes to Digital Marketing for Restaurants?
According to Terrence, showing up is the most important part. And that means all of the different silos of digital - search engines, review sites, etc. Sometimes you have to pay, but sometimes it’s about taking advantage of free options. The good news is that because digital marketing is so transparent, you can easily put KPIs in place to make sure you’re maximizing your impact.
Superior Operations More Important Than Ever
From Michael’s standpoint, even though so much is changing with digital, it all comes back to restaurant 101 and having superior operations. It has become so easy, maybe even easier, to share experiences with the public rather than the restaurant itself, when something goes wrong.The statistic is 1 out of 25 unhappy customers will complain to your face. The amount of reviews are actually going up. There are technologies now that allow you to intervene with the guest before they have the opportunity to get to that next place online, you can prevent some of the negative from getting worse.
What is the Definition of Hospitality Today?
Rolf Gehrung explained the digital restaurant can seem overwhelming because there’s change associated with it. The fundamentals should still be the driving factor for how you operate. Those things you learn early on that you operationalize. Hospitality today is really about the guest experience. Giving them the option to communicate and interact the way they want to. That’s the nice thing about technology is there are so many options to provide a guest. The operators that are going to be successful are the ones who embrace that. We see a lot of operators who say, “this is how we do it, we don’t want to enable guests to order off their phone or off a kiosk”. But there’s a whole generation that has an entirely different definition of what guest experience is all about.
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