Elevating the Restaurant Experience

Elevating the Restaurant Experience: Why the Network Matters A framework to help restaurant operators bridge the gap between vision and reality.

The restaurant industry has lagged other consumer industries when it comes to investing in front-of-house technologies that focus on enhancing the guest experience. However, the increasingly digital and connected lives of consumers is forcing their hand, and they are investing in technologies that empower and provide greater convenience to their guests. As digital becomes a core and integral part of the restaurant experience the importance of having a strong network will only rise, because a failure of the network will be a failure of the customer experience.

Research Partner

The Future of The Restaurant Dining experience starts at your fingertips The dining experience today starts much before a guest enters a restaurant, it starts with reading Yelp reviews, exploring vegan menu options, reserving tables and even ordering ahead. Restaurant operators need to serve the experience continuum and not just discrete in-restaurant moments. The biggest challenge in delivering on this experience continuum isn’t the online experience, but when guests walk into a restaurant to interact with physical spaces and human beings.

Guest expect a frictionless customer experience that empowers them with relevant information and makes it convenient for them to do things on their time and at their pace. This requires restaurant operators to invest in front-of-house technologies that directly impact Customer Experience and back-of-house capabilities that impact Team-Member Efficiency and Restaurant Operations.

The restaurant experience will transform across 4 key areas and impact the 3 core business value areas mentioned above:

Integrated Orders

Payments

Loyalty & Personalization

Dining Experience

Relevant Offers & Order History

Connectivity & Information

Improved Training. Cues on when and how to interact

Customer Experience

Order Anywhere (App. Web. Kiosk)

Quick & Easy Checkout (Payment, Receipt, Tab-split)

Team Member Efficiency

Track Any Order Easily

Reduce time spent

Restaurant Operations

Order Visibility (Integration)

Secure & Reliable

Real-Time Analytics

Sources : 1RIS Customer Engagement Study, 2015, 2EKN US Millennials Shopping Preferences Survey, 2014

Wi-Fi. Support Rich Content

Kitchen Execution

Get Anywhere (Restaurant, Home)

Manage Workschedule Smart Scheduling. Integrate with partners like Postmates

The Iceberg We Forget Making transformation happen across these four areas will require a significant investment in technology, and we have seen a significant uptick in technology budgets over the last 3 years. If we look at the top investment priorities for 2015-16 we see that supporting most of the technologies that will be implemented will require a significant amount of integration effort and an improvement in store connectivity.

Current Install Base 2015 Roll-Out Plans

Mobile Wallet

15%

37%

Creating an EMV Roadmap

40%

35%

Tokenization at the card swipe

48%

32%

30%

Mobile device for manager use Tableside Payment Device/Mobile POS NFC Capability Beacons for Location-based marketing

13% 11%

29% 28% 52%

20%

for 2015 have a direct reliance on the network

30%

29%

18%

Point-to-point encryption Wireless credit card authorization

30% 41%

Social CRM

9 in 10 tech plans

27% 27%

Source: HT-EKN Restaurant Technology Study: 2015

The challenge is that restaurant operators have poor line of sight into their network performance, until they fail, and they will fail gloriously if we continue to increase the amount of technology and the data that flows into the restaurant without improving the network. A poor network can significantly add friction to the instore customer experience, be it long lines at the point of sale (POS), inability to order online, a shoddy and frustrating guest Wi-Fi or store associates struggling to get accurate inventory/order information. So as you transform your restaurant experience understand what kind of core bandwidth and network you need because as unsexy as it may be, store nirvana cannot happen with it’s backbone, a high performance store network.

What can the network support? What it can’t Network Performance Good

Poor

Network Security

Cost of adding bandwidth

Ease of adding bandwidth

Managing peak traffic

Application response time

Network downtime

Guest Wi-Fi Is Table-Stakes: Do It Well Or Don’t Do It A few years back when guest Wi-Fi was still a novelty it did drive traffic and revenue, but with widespread adoption it’s impact has been blunted. Consumers don’t flock to a restaurant just because it has Wi-Fi, but given an opportunity they prefer to dine in one that has and end up spending more time in it. The challenge for restaurant operators is two-fold, if you don’t have Wi-Fi and the directly competing restaurant down the street does there is a fair chance you will lose customers to them, and if you have poor Wi-Fi then customer satisfaction will tank and impact repeat visits.

Wi-Fi Adoption

74%

As restaurant operators prepare to implement or augment guest Wi-F they should consider the following:

o o o o o o o

Create a simple problem statement articulating why and how guest Wi-Fi fits into your business model Focus on how you will impact the following KPIs: Customer Satisfaction, Guest Traffic, Basket Size Build a comprehensive marketing plan on how you will drive basket size for customers that are on your Wi-Fi Assess how much bandwidth you need, get more. Partner with a provider that can help you augment this quickly Clearly communicate to the customers what they can and can’t do on the Wi-Fi and how their data will be used Use Wi-Fi to build to enrich your customer information and get to a single view of the customer Explore tiered Wi-Fi models where “loyal” customers get higher speeds and access

Expected KPI%

Actual KPI

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

15.7%

13%

Guest traffic

14.4%

6%

Average time spent by guests in-restaurant

14.0%

12%

Source: EKN-Hughes Business Network Impact Survey 2015

Network Capability: Business Value Impact Areas Customer Experience

Team Member Effectiveness

80%+

80%

of restaurants plan to offer guest Wi-Fi

of team members will manage

in the next 12 months

workload/schedules on their mobile devices in the next 12 months

5.4 MB

77%

Guest Wi-Fi network is what restaurant’s

will take training courses on their

need. They currently have 3 MB

mobile devices in the next 12 months

Restaurant Operations 5 MB is the minimum bandwidth that restaurant operators want. They currently have 3 MB

14% on average is the improvement in data-

Less than

50%

time personalization in the restaurant

devices in the next 12 months

20% of restaurant’s can execute real-

78%

mode for their app

the network

will make video calls on their mobile

9%

78% operators plan to have an in-restaurant

retrieval time by upgrading

9%

increase in associate productivity by improving the network

Beacons, Cloud Based POS and Table-Top ordering devices are top

3 technologies that

retailers can’t support with their current network

A Framework for Evaluating your Network This framework helps evaluate how restaurant operators can measure the efficiency and efficacy of their network. It breaks down the elements of a high performance network across 5 core areas and maps them to business impact so one can understand how networks drive measurable value.

Restaurant Network Performance Framework Capacity

Application Performance

Network Security

(To get a personalized assessment on how your network performs on this framework contact: info@eknresearch.com)

Network Reliability

Capacity: Do I have enough bandwidth?

Cloud Readliness

Without enough bandwidth you can’t support any business outcome be it customer expectations, team member effectiveness or restaurant operations Impact • Add capacity easily • Add capacity quickly • Add capacity at a reasonable cost

So how much bandwidth do you need ?

Key Factors: Tech Deployment, Footprint, Format Digital Retailers Starbucks

Application Performance : Are my applications responsive and fast?

Not all applications need to be real-time and not all data is priority.

Understanding how to prioritize traffic and manage your network is critical Impact • Respond quickly (impact QoE) • Load content such as media files quickly (impacts restaurant experience) • Check-out quickly (impact restaurant staff’s efficiency)

Interactive Experiences

Industry Target Industry Average

2 MB 3.3 MB

4.9 MB

10 MB

15 MB

20 MB+

POS (Basic Register Capabilities) Basic Kitchen Execution Capabilities Basic Wi-Fi

Good Guest Wi-Fi

Great Guest Wi-Fi

Associate Training Videos Table Top Devices Cloud Solutions Interactive Rich-Media

Source: EKN-Hughes Business Network Impact Survey 2015

Cloud Readiness : Can I use cloud solutions?

The cloud isn’t about cost, it’s about speed and reducing integration effort, adopting cloud based applications has benefits but it also means building a much stronger network infrastructure Impact • Reduce overhead costs without replacing existing technologies • Offers WAN optimization for both terrestrial and satellite networks in a distributed enterprise • Enterprise exposure to cloud enabled restaurant applications • Plans for near future adoption for cloud-based solutions

Network Reliability: Will my network fail?

Understanding your network capacity and investing in the right back-up networks is critical to ensuring that the store never goes down Impact • End to end priority for business applications • Guarding against primary network outages • Secondary connection used in a co-primary configuration for back-up

Network Security: Is my network secure?

An underinvested but critical area, especially when it comes to guest Wi-Fi. Security is the cost of doing business and lax network security can lead to multimillion dollar breaches and loss of brand equity Impact • Next generation firewall for advanced threat protection • PCI compliant network • Category-based content filtering (restricted site access)

EKN Network Business Impact Assessment The promise of a richer, more seamless in-store experience is comprised of a variety technology enabled use-cases such as store associate assisted selling, digital or interactive displays, smart fitting rooms, RFID tagged merchandise, self-service kiosks, video-based analytics, and locationbased promotions.

All of these increase the data I/O within and outside the store’s four walls and bring the need for a high-performance, secure, reliable store network into sharp focus.

However, network tech-speak can be overbearing for business executives, and technology executives do not have a standardized framework through which to communicate the business value of the store network nor the impact of the friction in user experience caused by poor network performance.

EKN has partnered with Hughes to develop an industry standard framework for assessing the maturity of retailers’ and restaurants’ network. Our aim is to help business and technology executives focused on the in-store experience to collaborate better, and ultimately elevate the role of in-store network infrastructure to being an active ingredient of a retailer’s in-store experience strategy.

Take the 2-minute assessment: http://quickscan.eknresearch.com/networkroi/ The full Network Business Impact Value Assessment tool is available to qualified retailers.

To request access to the tool, please email us at EKNInfo@edgellmail.com with the subject “NetworkROI”

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