During the recent YFood London Food Tech Week in May; Vita Mojo partnered with NKD, an agency specialising in employee engagement and customer experience.
We focused on how digital ordering will change the restaurant experience and we will need to enhance the skills of our people to engage with customers proactively and build relationships.
We asked: how technology can work with a human touch to enhance the guest experience in restaurants or any service driven sector? And how we make our customers better lovers?
NKD combine expertise in strategic consulting, behavioral change, and creative communications to:
Shift thinking, change behaviour and transform performance for some of the world’s biggest brands – such as DHL and Virgin Atlantic.
Vita Mojo is a software and restaurants company with three ultra personalised health focused restaurants and a suite of restaurant software focused on transforming the way restaurants operate.
We combined our expertise in digital ordering, restaurants and employee engagement to bring you the following insights.
The Rise of Restaurant Focused Digital Ordering
Digital ordering in a restaurant context can solve a number of problems and create opportunities for an analogue driven environment.
It’s all about sales growth
- Increasing ATV through digital menus
- Managing congestion and maximising throughput over peak
- A personalised menu discovery that that keeps up with changing consumer trends
Data that makes you think
- Data driven approach creating actionable insights for operators
- Moving away from emotional decision making and embracing big data
- Rich customer data through online ordering and integrated feedback and loyalty
Unlock the value of your people
- Reducing labour costs through reducing transactional staff, increasing digital ordering
- Increasing productivity through operational data insights
- Upskill staff to add value as brand ambassadors
AUGMENTED HUMANITY
Better Tech. Better Servers. Better Customers
Technology is disrupting the way people behave around eating out. It has the power to give customers control over their choices. It can increase their loyalty to your restaurant brand. It can reduce your brand’s labour costs. It frees service staff from transactions and allows space for interactions. Tech is good for customers, right? Or is it more human connection that people crave?
We are all customers. Most of us have customers. Most of us do want to give our customers a fantastic experience. But is it really possible to deliver ‘fantastic’ every time?
Surely our servers can’t be held responsible for that guy’s reaction?!
The restaurant sector is uber competitive. Differentiation is all about customer experience.
We think that the best tech is part of the customer experience solution for restaurants – giving people the choices they want and the control they want over the things that matter to them is super psycho-savvy.
But customer experience is human as well as digital, so how do you augment the human experience? How do you change what you can’t control?
Help Customers Be Better Humans
If we’re going to train customers to be better humans:
- They need to notice they’ve been noticed
- They need to be involved in creating their experience
- They need to feel loved
Only when they feel the love will they pass on the love, and augment humanity for someone else.
To help our customers be better humans, we have to rethink the role of servers. They need to become psychologists, social workers, counsellors and clowns. They have to re-think themselves; “I am no longer a customer server, I’m a customer trainer. I am training customers to be better lovers!”
Time to turn human-psych savvy, because it takes tech and humans to push our psychological buttons.
The great news about technology is that it liberates servers, taking transactions out of their hands and giving them space to create human chemistry..
Some helpful hints:
- Notice people more
- Involve people more
- Love people against all odds!
Creating human chemistry
Bringing tech and humans together to create a customer experience will differentiate the restaurants brands of the future:
- Transform a counter intuitive menu experience through an intuitive digital interface and personalised recommendations
- Menu discovery and transparency via a digital menu creating individual choice
- Augment your restaurant brand differentiation through a personalised customer experience
