The future of restaurants: investing in people and new technologies

Nowadays, the increasingly important customer opinion expressed in reviews is able to close restaurants or, on the contrary, take them to the top of the gastronomic lists. To get satisfied customers eager to return to the establishment or recommend the restaurant, it is important to offer them an exceptional experience. The quality of the food is important, but impeccable customer service from the room staff is necessary. Which makes the employees the restaurant’s most important asset. Let’s see where the key to the future of restaurants is:

Without a doubt, betting on human capital is one of the keys to success in restaurants. But it is no use having the right employees if they are not at the right time and place to serve guests. This is where staff planning and investment in new technologies, which are the future of restaurants, becomes important.

Proper planning and management of restaurant staff and other assets is essential, in fact 90% of restaurants that close, is due to poor planning and management. To solve this problem, there are tools based on Artificial Intelligence that help greatly to the planning of shifts and employees work schedules, as well as orders to suppliers and optimization of food use. These solutions ensure that you will have the right employee in the right place at the right time to serve the customers, or you will optimize the use of food to waste as little as possible. Ultimately, ensuring the operational efficiency of the restaurant.

“Investing in people and at the same time in technology based on Artificial Intelligence, is the most intelligent strategy in today’s hospitality sector.”

Investing in people

The first point to take into account is to choose well who will be the face of your company in front of the client. Customer-facing employees will be the customer’s direct contact with the restaurant. For this reason it is important to define very well the profiles we need and to take special care in the processes of recruitment, selection and hiring.

There are intelligent tools that are able to predict the hiring needs of the restaurant during the year adapting to the demand at all times.

The next step would be to focus employee training on customer service, so that they are able to manage exceptional customer service in any customer-related situation that may happen in the restaurant. Investing in continuous training at all levels is key to not being left behind and being more competitive every day. Like all other sectors, catering is an industry that is constantly changing and evolving.

As a Temkin Group study shows, restaurant companies with the best customer experience (and the best valued for this fact) have more engaged employees than their competitors. This means that the employee’s engagement with the company is directly related to the customer experience. Having customer-facing employees engaged with the restaurant will then be another key point to take into account when managing the room staff.

There are smart solutions that increase employee engagement with the restaurant. For example, scheduling solutions that take workers’ preferences into account, something that room employees value very much.

Investing in new technologies

The digital transformation of processes within companies thanks to new technologies is a reality that affects the entire business world, and restaurants are not an exception. Smart tools that help in areas as different as hiring employees, managing resources in the kitchen or planning schedules, save restaurants a lot of time and costs.

According to the confidence indicator carried out by Hostelería de España in restaurants throughout the country, 83.5% say they have digital tools, compared to 13.9% who do not have any.

“IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data or cloud technologies are technological trends that already have a clear reflection in our daily lives. And therefore in the hospitality sector. It is very important for the catering industry to realize the importance of investing in this type of tools, and to develop digital transformation plans because they will gain in productivity, improve their internal processes, have better data on their customers’ behavior and therefore give them a better service. This is the future of restaurants.”
José Luis Cuerda, Director of the Professionals and Small Business Segment of Vodafone Spain

As shown in the Report on Digitisation in the Hospitality Sector, by TechFood Consult and Basque Culinary Center; the workforce management is the second most controlled operational task by restaurants (81%), where 31% of respondents say they rely on digital tools for their management. This means that 69% still perform this operational task manually or without the support of digital tools.

A workforce management solution such as ORQUEST, can help restaurants in areas such as hiring, staff sizing, scheduling and task planning, internal communication, presence control and analysis for decision making. Avoiding the overstaffing or understaffing, increasing restaurant productivity and employee and customer satisfaction, improving customer service and not forgetting the ability to make better decisions based on real data.