A Tablet For Every Restaurant Tabletop? Your next waiter could be a Tablet
A Tablet For Every Restaurant Tabletop?
Your next waiter could be an iPad
By Allee Manning Oct 21, 2016 at 2:02 PM ET
Good news for anyone sick of waiting for the check to
arrive when there are pants to go home and unbutton, and for restaurateurs
trying to turn tables on a busy night: all you need is iPads.
A new report published in the Cornell University School
of Hotel Administration’s Center For Hospitality Research has found that adding
tabletop tech at “full-service casual dining chains” seems to benefit patrons
and customers alike. By monitoring one chain restaurant’s service over the
course of two Fridays and two Saturdays between 12:00-10:00 p.m., researchers
discovered that table turnover rates improved and customer spending increased
when a table top-placed tablet was used for ordering and/or settling the bill.
On average, guests that used tabletop devices to order
spent $3.61 more on a meal, something researcher Alex Susskind said represented
a win-win for the restaurant and its guests.
“Think about the last time you were in a full service
restaurant and you wanted to order another drink and the server wasn’t around
in time and you had to move through your meal without ordering it,” he said.
“Those lost opportunities become fewer and fewer when customers use the
technology [to place orders].” Also you don’t have to talk to extraneous humans
— bonus.
Even better — while customers were spending more, they
were making it through their meals quicker, using the device to order refills
and request service rather than waiting for a server to walk by. If the guests
ordered and paid with tabletop technology, their overall dining time was
reduced by 31 percent. Less time, more customers, more money.
“It provides opportunity for the restaurant to save some
time and money in labor dollars,” Susskind said of the turnover rate. “If
servers can be freed up from doing some of the work that customers end up
doing, that gives them an opportunity to better serve their customer in the big
picture. They’re not pushing buttons in a side room, they’re just focusing on
what the customers want and getting it to them more quickly.”
Is this better for wait staff? Probably not. Susskind
noted that increased time efficiency could potentially allow restaurant
management to cut their service staff if they wanted, rather than allowing
their servers to spend the added time fulfilling other tasks. On the other
hand, a past study conducted by the same researchers published in the journal
Service Science shows that customers who used tabletop devices still tipped the
same amount. Customers who enjoyed using a tabletop device and were more likely
to return to the restaurant because of it were more likely to leave a higher
tip.
That same prior study found that, on the whole, 70 to 80
percent of consumers surveyed saw benefits to having guest-facing tech as part
of their dining experiences, though 20 percent “really didn’t like it,” largely
due to complications using the technology.
It’s not surprising that millennials are typically most
receptive to this type of service experience, given its reliance on technology
and their baseline technical literacy.
“Baby boomers are mixed on it,” Susskind said, though he
doesn’t think this will prevent a more widespread usage of the technology from
taking off. “It’s something customers are wanting more and more of, and if you
can give customers…more control of their service experience, that’s a positive
thing. We have to recognize that millennials are the next generation that will
have strong consumer influence. These types of things are built for the
future.”
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