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Tag Archives: restaurants

Miso’s kitchen robots will slide into White Castle restaurants this year

July 14, 2020   Big Data

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Food prep robot startup Miso Robotics today announced that fast-food chain White Castle has signed on as a customer. In a pilot later this fall, White Castle plans to bring Miso’s robots into kitchens and benchmark them for speed in production, taste, quality, and backend point-of-sales integration ahead of tests, with a rollout to locations across the U.S.

Miso says that Flippy has already been testing out the White Castle menu at the company’s Pasadena, California R&D kitchen.

As declines in business resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic place strains on the hospitality segment, Miso believes that robots working alongside human workers can cut costs while improving efficiency — and overall safety. The company asserts White Castle’s decision to test Flippy creates an avenue for reducing human contact with food during the cooking process and ensuring consistency, while at the same time freeing up human cooks to focus their attention on less time-consuming and repetitive tasks.

“There are a number of benefits to employing Flippy, and a major one is to redeploy valuable team members where they are needed more today to create the best possible customer experience,” a Miso spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “There’s now greater demand for delivery, takeout, enhanced cleaning schedules. That’s all front of the house work that a few years ago didn’t need to be accounted for in staffing to keep customers satisfied. Flippy can keep the production up and meet the quality standards customers expect, so staff stays focused on shifting new demands.”

 Miso’s kitchen robots will slide into White Castle restaurants this year

Miso has long claimed that its flagship robot Flippy — and Flippy’s successor, Miso Robot on a Rail (ROAR), which White Castle has agreed to test — can boost productivity by working with humans as opposed to replacing them. ROAR, which is expected to begin shipping commercially by the end of 2020 for around $ 30,000, or half the cost of a single Flippy unit, can be installed on a floor or under a standard kitchen hood, allowing it to work two stations and interact with a cold storage hopper. On the software side, it benefits from improvements to Miso AI (Miso’s cloud-based platform) that expand the number of cookable food categories to over a dozen, including chicken tenders, chicken wings, tater tots, french fries and waffle fries, cheese sticks, potato wedges, corn dogs, popcorn shrimp and chicken, and onion rings.

ROAR can prep hundreds of orders an hour thanks to a combination of cameras and safety scanners, obtaining frozen food and cooking it without assistance from a human team member. It alerts nearby workers when orders are ready to be served, and it takes on tasks like scraping grills, draining excess fry oil, and skimming oil between frying as it recognizes and monitors items like baskets and burger patties in real time. Plus, it integrates with point-of-sale systems (via Miso AI) to route orders automatically and optimize which tasks to perform.

Miso says it saw “tremendous success” last year, serving up more than 15,000 burgers and more than 31,000 pounds of chicken tenders and tots. Flippy will soon flip burgers at more than 50 CaliBurger locations globally, and so far it’s been deployed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Chase Field in Phoenix, and CaliBurger locations in Pasadena.

More recently, Miso said it would deploy new tools to its platform in CaliBurger restaurants as part of a pilot with CaliGroup intended to improve safety and health standards. In the coming weeks, in partnership with payment provider PopID, the company will install a thermal-based screening device in a CaliBurger location in Pasadena that attaches to doors to measure the body temperatures of people attempting to enter the restaurant. Miso also says it will also install physical PopID terminals so that guests can transact without touching a panel, using cash, or swiping a credit card — all of which can transfer pathogens.

Despite Miso’s claims to the contrary, think tanks like the Brookings Institution anticipate automation will cause the loss of countless jobs. Roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation, meaning at least 70% of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology, according to a report. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters, and others in food services.

But some restaurant industry executives claim high turnover rates underscore the need for automation. The official U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015 to 2017 period, with the average cost to replace a worker estimated at $ 2,100 to $ 2,800.

“We started talking to White Castle about a year ago. They came to us with the same challenges much of the industry was experiencing — labor, operational costs to stay competitive mounting, and the need to meet on-demand delivery culture with high quality. In truth, the pandemic just accelerated conversations,” the spokesperson said.

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Leveraging Your Restaurant’s PMIX to Reduce Food Cost

September 27, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 998408416 Leveraging Your Restaurant’s PMIX to Reduce Food Cost

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality 

You may have heard it referred to as a product mix, sales mix, or a menu item sales report—a PMIX has many names, but one major purpose: to provide insight to effectively manage food cost. That insight changes when using the PMIX daily versus weekly and monthly. Many successful operators use it frequently, but perhaps not as comprehensively as they should. This deeper dive will help you leverage this valuable report to ensure your restaurant is achieving its best food cost possible.

Daily

The daily PMIX provides quick insight for managers, shining light on crucial metrics including daily prep usage and menu item performance by day of the week.

Daily Prep Usage 

One leading practice to identify and stop waste is to check the variance between actual and theoretical prep usage. This exercise should be performed daily by someone who has an intimate working knowledge of ingredients, recipes and station prep schematics, like a kitchen supervisor or manager.

Start by checking how many of one item you sold on the PMIX, then compare that to actual prep usage in that specific station on the line.

Example: If you sold 12 orders of mahi mahi tacos yesterday, there should be an equal depletion of the prep for mahi mahi tacos on the line. So, if a full pan of cabbage mix yields 24 orders of tacos and the pan was full yesterday, there should be approximately a half pan left. If there is less on hand, you just uncovered a problem you need to research. Are the cooks adding too much cabbage to the tacos? Was
the cabbage thrown away due to over-prepping? Use the daily PMIX to pinpoint waste.

Menu Item Performance by Day of Week

Another leading practice is to keep your historical PMIX reports in a binder tabbed by day of week (i.e. Mon, Tues, Wed, so on.). When filling out your daily prep list, you can make informed decisions of how much of an item to prep based on trends.

 Example: looking at the PMIX for the past four Sundays you notice that you sell 50% less buffalo 

wings than on Saturdays. Since you spotted this trend, you’re able to flex your par for buffalo wing prep between Saturday and Sunday, consequently reducing waste and improving freshness.

Weekly

A weekly PMIX will provide insight into activities performed less frequently, like ordering or product shelf life analysis.

Ordering

Viewing your rolled-up menu item sales quantities for a full week will provide helpful insights into

setting order pars. It’s a good idea to start with analyzing your most expensive food items and adjust your order pars accordingly.

Example: if you know you sell an average of 100 orders of mahi mahi tacos per week and there is 4 oz of fish per order, you know you’ll need about 25 pounds of fish on hand per week, assuming a 100% yield.

Product Shelf Life Analysis

The magic balance in a restaurant is to produce fresh food without excessive waste and labor, and shelf lives help maintain that balance. The goal for operators is to prep enough of something to last its full shelf life. Analyzing the weekly product mix to make sure you’re prepping to hit the shelf life “sweet spot” will help you manage food quality, reduce waste AND save labor.

Example: if there are 20 ingredients in your ranch dressing and it has a 4-day shelf life, you can see how prepping ranch every day would be a waste of valuable time. Oppositely, if you’re prepping too much and it doesn’t taste as good after four days, you’ll risk wasting it or serving an inferior product to your guests.

Monthly

Running a monthly PMIX is a great way to analyze the performance of each of your menu items.

Menu Item Performance

The science of menu engineering is complex. Basically, it all starts by categorizing menu item

performance based on popularity and profitability. Knowing which category each of your menu items fall into will help you make informed decisions about what action to take to improve your menu’s performance. Here are the four groups along with examples of possible actions to take:

  • Star: high popularity, high profit—this is a winner! Keep it.
  • Plow horse: high popularity, low profit—think about reformulating the item to improve margin
  • Puzzle: low popularity, high profit—highlight or reposition on the menu, or run a promotion.
  • Dog: low popularity, low profit—replace with a different item on your next menu rollout.
Posted on Thu, September 26, 2019
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3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurant’s Online Reputation

July 18, 2019   NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

A healthy online reputation is absolutely critical to the success of a business and restaurants are no exception. Consider this: 75% of respondents to the 2019 Brand Disinformation Impact Study report that the public reputation of a brand will impact their purchase decisions.

At the same time, the public reputation of a brand can be largely outside of its direct control. In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 65% of participants named search engines as their most trusted source when performing research on a business.

Regardless of where and what potential guests hear about your restaurant, public perception has a significant impact. Among companies responding to Deloitte’s Reputation@Risk 41% experienced a negative reputation event and reported a corresponding decrease in brand value and revenue.

But there is an upside: for restaurants participating in a Harvard study on Yelp reviews, those included received a 9% increase in revenue based on every one-star boost in their Yelp rating. That means there could be an 18% difference in revenue for a restaurant with a 3-star rating and one with a 5-star rating – a difference that could make or break any small business.

So how can busy restaurant owners work to establish, maintain and protect their online brand reputation to maximize sales and minimize negative brand events? Here are our top 3 recommendations:

1. Ensure Consistency Across All Channels

Restaurant owners strive to create a strong brand presence inside their brick-and-mortar outlets. A strong color scheme, images and menu design that fit the brand, and themed decorations can all work in unison to convey the brand message. But if that brand consistency doesn’t translate to the online sphere, it can wreak havoc on a restaurant’s online reputation.

Let’s say a potential guest hears about your restaurant and runs a Google search to see what comes up. Maybe there’s an address, a photo of your restaurant, and a link to the website, but no online ordering mechanism.

Then the guest tries searching on Facebook or Yelp and finds a page with no menu images and a different phone number than the Google listing. There’s nothing there that conveys the brand presence you’ve worked so hard to build inside your restaurant. Now what?

In order to create a unified brand presence, restaurants must consider every platform potential guests might interact with. That list can include the Google business page associated with your restaurant, your restaurant’s website, Yelp listing (and associated reviews), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts, and GrubHub and Favor ordering systems.

Take a look at Torchy’s Tacos, a local taco chain in Austin, Texas. It has a very distinct brand presence which is equal parts dirty, decadent and devilish. And the chain really nailed cross-channel consistency, as evidenced by the listings on nearly every platform. Here are a few:

Torchy’s Google search results:

Google%20Screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Torchy’s Facebook page:

Facebook%20Screemshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Torchy’s Yelp page:

Yelp%20Sreenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

And its brand consistency continues across Favor, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.

2. Develop an Easy, Intuitive Website

Having a website that is consistent with your restaurant’s brand promise is one thing, but making it simple and straightforward for potential guests to find what they need is a totally different ballgame.

Beyond duplicating the branding from your brick-and-mortar location on the website, potential guests must be able to quickly find what they need and complete any actions easily. Are they able to:

  • View menu items with easy-to-navigate categories
  • Find your restaurant’s contact information (and different locations, if applicable)
  • Make reservations
  • Place online orders
  • View specials like happy hours, fixed-price days, or brunches
  • Submit catering requests

Do all these actions flow seamlessly off your website’s main homepage? Could the online ordering system use an overhaul to simplify the process? Is it easier for guests to use your reservation system or a plug-in from OpenTable or Resy? These are all questions to ask when designing the optimal experience for your website.

Consider Via 313, a Detroit-style, Austin-based pizza restaurant with five locations. Its homepage provides easy access to a variety of menu categories right off the bat. The left nav offers a direct link to the full menu, online ordering from both its trailers and brick-and-mortar restaurants and a list of locations.

website%20screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

Ordering pizza can get complex pretty quickly, with requests for different types of crusts and swapping out toppings. However, Via 313’s online ordering platform makes it straightforward to sub out ricotta cheese for standard gorgonzola cheese on the restaurant’s popular Cadillac pizza:

order%20screenshot 3 Ways to Safeguard Your Restaurants Online Reputation

The only improvement here would be a clear link to large catering orders for groups.

3. Create (and Enforce) a Clear Employee Communication Plan

Restaurant staff are trained on how to interact with guests when they’re on the floor. However, they may not consider the impact of their words when they’re off the clock. And that’s not just talking about your restaurant in particular, it’s anything they say or do.

Anyone who works for your restaurant may update their social media profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any number of platforms to display their occupation, immediately connecting them to your brand on social media. Anything they say can then be affiliated with the restaurant.

Let’s say you run a farm-to-table restaurant that focuses on sustainability in the food chain. Your marketing efforts are consistent across channels. You have an easy, intuitive website. Business is good. Then one of your employees starts tweeting articles in opposition to the sustainability movement. All of a sudden, your brand is connected to the opposite side of the argument, and your guests may notice and take action.

Given the ramifications, it’s critical that brands train employees to use the same discretion on social media as they would when they’re working in your restaurant. Otherwise you might end up with:

  • Employees airing your business’s accounting mistakes on Facebook, as in the case of Triple Play Sports Bar & Grill in Watertown, Connecticut.
  • Staff who aren’t even working for you yet (!) tweeting their choice words for their new job at your establishment, like the Texas teenager who was scheduled to start working at Jet’s Pizzeria in Mansfield, Texas. (She was fired before even starting her job.)
  • A huge backlash on your hands, like Applebee’s experienced with its decision to fire Chelsea Welch, a waitress who posted a photo of a customer’s receipt that included a note about why he doesn’t tip.

Don’t Want to Do It All Yourself?

For a new restaurant with a small staff, finding the time to create the framework for a solid online reputation may seem pretty overwhelming – and nearly impossible. However, there are marketing agencies that specialize in working with restaurants to build, grow and maintain their online reputations.

And even if you don’t have the budget to hire an agency, try working on your restaurant’s online reputation one chunk at a time. The first priority items might be your Google business listing, website, Yelp page and employee communication plan. Next, set up online ordering via a platform like UberEats or GrubHub, and put processes in place to read and respond to reviews.

Make no mistake: safeguarding your restaurant’s reputation will take time and attention from your staff that can sometimes be difficult to divert. However, consider it your insurance policy against brand-damaging events that could impact your restaurant over the long term.

Posted on Thu, July 18, 2019
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Transparency is Vital Step for Restaurants in Addressing Food Allergens

June 16, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 944229020 Transparency is Vital Step for Restaurants in Addressing Food Allergens

Posted by Kevin Lentz, NetSuite Product Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Eating out should be a relaxing experience where guests sit back, order freely and enjoy their meal. For those with food allergies, though, it is rarely quite that carefree. For the estimated 15 million U.S. consumers with a food allergy, a restaurant can prove to be a very challenging environment. A survey conducted at the 2007 Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network conference found that 34% of the 294 respondents had experienced at least one food allergic reaction in a restaurant. A different study revealed that nearly half of fatal food allergic reactions over a 13-year period were caused by food from a restaurant or other food service establishment.

And the stakes are high for the restaurant. If you mishandle the situation, your best case is a ruined evening out and a lost customer, but your worst case could be dire. With food allergic reactions accounting for as many as 30,000 ER visits each year and as many as 200 deaths, it’s important to get your allergy preparations right.

So far, only four states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Virginia) and a handful of cities have enacted legislation concerning allergen safety in restaurants. So how can a restaurant proactively serve this segment? In a word: transparency.

Anything you can do to shed light on your prep process and ingredient lists will be helpful. This consumer segment is intensely scrutinous and inquisitive, and they have to be. So have the information as readily available as possible. That may be as simple as ensuring waitstaff are familiar with company-approved answers to questions, or you may choose to go further.

For instance, are you able to provide a list of each ingredient for each of your dishes, and are you able to confirm the source and preparation methods for each of your ingredients? Some restaurants are able to provide the actual labels with clear allergen statements to their patrons upon request. Consider whether you are able to do this at the time of ordering or ahead of time when the guest is researching dining options.

Consider also how food is prepared in your kitchen. Do you maintain a separate location to prepare allergy-free dishes? Be sure you can answer questions around cleaning and cross-contamination, as well. What other dishes are prepared there? How often is it cleaned? Ready access to this information will help put allergen-aware guests at ease.

Perhaps most important is staff training. Staff should be regularly trained for food allergen safety and allergen awareness, and consistently reminded of safe food handling procedures. No amount of process will keep guests safe if it does not become a way of doing business. This is also a good time mention that you should research your state’s regulations in terms of staff training, supplemental allergen awareness training, and any signage required to maintain compliance.

With an estimated 10% of the population directly affected by a food allergy, it’s important that the restaurateur does everything possible to properly and safely serve this segment. Often, that means empowering your staff and your customer. Empower your staff with adequate training and awareness so they can assist the guest appropriately and empower your allergy-aware guests with whatever information that they may need to sit back order freely and enjoy their meal.

Everyone will be better for it.

Posted on Thu, June 13, 2019
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Three Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Yelp Rating

February 17, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 171115963 Three Ways to Increase Your Restaurant’s Yelp Rating

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Nearly half of restaurant-goers surveyed said they checked an online review before visiting a business, according to a survey by Restaurant Bistro. Although Google is gaining traction for its reviews, Yelp is still the dominant destination for restaurant reviews, so much so that the restaurant category is most commonly associated with Yelp, according to a recent post on the Yelp blog. In fact, 94 percent of diners are influenced by online reviews, according to a TripAdvisor survey.

But here’s the thing: it’s really hard for a restaurant get a very high rating on Yelp, even harder than it is for businesses in other industries. The average rating for businesses across Yelp is 3.77, with 40 percent of the ratings neither one star nor five stars. For restaurants the average Yelp rating is 3.71 which is consistent across the United States and Canada, according to the Yelp analysis.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Studies consistently show that consumers associate imperfection with authenticity, with even negative reviews serving a somewhat positive role because they establish trust, according to a study from Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center. And there are ways your business can continually try to push those ratings higher and ensure that it’s portrayed at its best to those scrolling through Yelp to make their dining choices. Here is some advice on how to increase your business’ Yelp rating.

1. Understand Yelp’s recommendation engine – and don’t try to game it

Yelp’s recommendation engine is powerful, but can also serve as a source of great frustration for restaurants that see positive reviews filtered out of rankings. About 75 percent of all reviews are recommended, according to Yelp, leaving of course a full one-quarter that are not. This means that while bogus reviews are ditched, sometimes a legitimate one might be caught in that net.

Yelp will “generally” filter out reviews from a person who has written only one review, has no profile photo or posts reviews that are too positive or too negative or are from a location other than where the business is located, according to an article on Vivial. Because quality, reliability and user activity weigh so high in Yelp’s ratings, there are some things you definitely don’t want to do if you’d like to boost your ratings, according to RevLocal. These include avoiding paying or incentivizing people to review your business or asking friends and family to write reviews.

2. Content is king, and brevity, the soul of…it

People pay more attention to what the review says than the star rating itself, according to a blog on Consumer Affairs.

In that same vein, shorter is better. The top 25 percent of mobile reviews by length rated 3.31 on average, while the 25 percent shortest came in at 4.10.

Yelp’s own data demonstrates the benefits of shorter reviews and the words that generally characterize them. A review that fits into a text message and sums up the experience with words like “great,” “best,” “awesome” and “amazing,” is much higher rated than reviews with the words, “ordered,” “came,” “minutes,” “asked” and “wanted,” according to Yelp.

Consider this in developing strategies for getting your customers to leverage Yelp. For instance, if you’re going to include some language on the bottom of a receipt or in a follow-up email asking for a review, consider phrases with a call to action like, “Let others know about your awesome time! Write a few quick words on Yelp!,” or “Was our pizza the best? Help us by spending a second on Yelp!”

What’s more, consider brevity and adjectives in deciding which reviews you want to have recommended of the ones that have been filtered out. According to RevLocal, “if you see a review a real customer has written on your Yelp page, but the review is being filtered, you can add the reviewer as a friend or vote the review useful, funny or cool.” This can help legitimate reviews be recognized by Yelp, according to the blog.

3. Respond to reviews 

Consumers are almost twice as likely to visit the business if the owner responds to a negative review, according to a survey from Review Trackers. How you respond to reviews – negative or positive — makes a big difference in whether consumers view the feedback as authentic and are willing to give your business a try.

First, it’s important to respond fast. Responding within 24 hours increases your chances of having a reviewer upgrade their review to a higher star rating by 33%, according to Yelp. Secondly, use the right channel. A Yelp Business User Account lends the ability to respond to reviews with a Public Comment or Direct Message.

Yelp recommends always starting the review process with a public comment so that, of course, the fact that you value customer service and feedback is apparent to all visitors. But consider following up with a direct message as well, according to Yelp, to gather more information from the consumer about their concerns, whether you believe they are valid or not. It not only lends valuable insight that can reshape how your business approaches something, but engaging a potential adversary could actually help turn them into an impactful ally.

These strategies can help boost your Yelp scores, and ensure consumers continue to spend time on the platform letting the world know just how great, awesome and amazing your restaurant is.

Posted on Thu, February 14, 2019
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3 Steps to Building Your Restaurant’s Digital Marketing Strategy

January 18, 2019   NetSuite
gettyimages 902932590 3 Steps to Building Your Restaurant’s Digital Marketing Strategy

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

If you’re like most restaurant managers, you got into the restaurant industry because you enjoy building teams and delivering great guest experiences — not because you’re a digital marketing expert. 

In today’s competitive restaurant environment, digital marketing is a basic job requirement. Every little bit you can do to promote your restaurant and get new guests in the door matters. That means you need to consider how your restaurant can engage guests through email, social media, search and more. 

Digital marketing may not be your area of expertise, but with a relatively small investment of your time, you'll uncover growth potential by reaching new guests through digital media/marketing. Use these tips to get the basics in place and bolster your restaurant’s digital marketing strategy.

1. Balance digital marketing strategy with traditional marketing. 

In today’s technology-heavy consumer landscape, marketing is more than flyers, newspaper ads and radio spots. As many as 46 percent of guests will learn about your restaurant through an online source, such as a website, blog or mobile app. And many of them rely on traditional marketing methods, too. About 31 percent of those guests still research their dining options using print media. Guests also cash in billions of coupons each year. The most effective marketing strategy will use both digital and traditional marketing methods to get the best results. 

For example, if you’re debating the merits of an email newsletter promotion versus a direct mail promotion, don’t assume you need to pick one or the other. Allocate some of your budget to print media and some to digital media to create a campaign that uses both to drive more traffic into your restaurant. Similarly, you can combine social media with in-store promotions, such as asking guests to tweet about their experience to receive a coupon off their next visit, or print cards that promote your next big online gift card sale. 

2. Pay attention to your Google listing.

Whether you created a Google listing for your restaurant or not, it probably pops up as the first entry when a prospective guest searches for your establishment. And since 85 percent of people search for local businesses online before they head out the door for dinner, it’s in your best interest to take ownership of your listing and make sure it has accurate and up-to-date information. 

Here’s how to do it: 

  • Click here click “start now.” 

  • Create a Google Account (or sign in if you already have one).

  • Enter the name of your business.

  • Enter the street address of your business. 

  • Select a business category. 

  • Enter a phone number or website URL for your business.

  • Verify your business immediately, or verify your business at another time by selecting “try a different method.”

Click here for more information about verifying your business on Google

3. Be picky about new trends.

In 2014, QR codes could be found on the front of almost every restaurant’s menu. In 2016, restaurants built discounts and events around the Pokémon GO App. And, it’s your best guess as to what wave will hit us next. 

There’s nothing wrong with embracing a particularly timely or newsworthy trend to build on guests’ excitement and bring them into your restaurant. But you should think carefully before making a big investment in new technology or marketing tactics that require a significant commitment if you’re just listening to the hype. If you find yourself investing in any and every new trend, you might be wasting time and money that would be better invested in more long-term campaigns. 

Being picky about trends for your restaurant means there’s no correct answer for whether or not you should design a custom app for your restaurant or simply sign up for meal delivery apps like Grubhub, DoorDash or Uber Eats. You just need to make an informed decision based on the demographics and technology habits of your guests, not one based on how many other restaurants are designing apps in 2019. 

It can be challenging to build a career in the restaurant industry and find yourself working on a digital marketing strategy. But if you take time to learn the basics and build your strategy with intention, you may be surprised at the results you can achieve.

Posted on Thu, January 17, 2019
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How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption

March 23, 2018   BI News and Info

For nerds, the weeks right before finals are a Cinderella moment. Suddenly they’re stars. Pocket protectors are fashionable; people find their jokes a whole lot funnier; Dungeons & Dragons sounds cool.

Many CIOs are enjoying this kind of moment now, as companies everywhere face the business equivalent of a final exam for a vital class they have managed to mostly avoid so far: digital transformation.

But as always, there is a limit to nerdy magic. No matter how helpful CIOs try to be, their classmates still won’t pass if they don’t learn the material. With IT increasingly central to every business—from the customer experience to the offering to the business model itself—we all need to start thinking like CIOs.

Pass the digital transformation exam, and you probably have a bright future ahead. A recent SAP-Oxford Economics study of 3,100 organizations in a variety of industries across 17 countries found that the companies that have taken the lead in digital transformation earn higher profits and revenues and have more competitive differentiation than their peers. They also expect 23% more revenue growth from their digital initiatives over the next two years—an estimate 2.5 to 4 times larger than the average company’s.

But the market is grading on a steep curve: this same SAP-Oxford study found that only 3% have completed some degree of digital transformation across their organization. Other surveys also suggest that most companies won’t be graduating anytime soon: in one recent survey of 450 heads of digital transformation for enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany by technology company Couchbase, 90% agreed that most digital projects fail to meet expectations and deliver only incremental improvements. Worse: over half (54%) believe that organizations that don’t succeed with their transformation project will fail or be absorbed by a savvier competitor within four years.

Companies that are making the grade understand that unlike earlier technical advances, digital transformation doesn’t just support the business, it’s the future of the business. That’s why 60% of digital leading companies have entrusted the leadership of their transformation to their CIO, and that’s why experts say businesspeople must do more than have a vague understanding of the technology. They must also master a way of thinking and looking at business challenges that is unfamiliar to most people outside the IT department.

In other words, if you don’t think like a CIO yet, now is a very good time to learn.

However, given that you probably don’t have a spare 15 years to learn what your CIO knows, we asked the experts what makes CIO thinking distinctive. Here are the top eight mind hacks.

1. Think in Systems

Q118 Feature3 img1 Jump How Restaurants Can Survive Digital DisruptionA lot of businesspeople are used to seeing their organization as a series of loosely joined silos. But in the world of digital business, everything is part of a larger system.

CIOs have known for a long time that smart processes win. Whether they were installing enterprise resource planning systems or working with the business to imagine the customer’s journey, they always had to think in holistic ways that crossed traditional departmental, functional, and operational boundaries.

Unlike other business leaders, CIOs spend their careers looking across systems. Why did our supply chain go down? How can we support this new business initiative beyond a single department or function? Now supported by end-to-end process methodologies such as design thinking, good CIOs have developed a way of looking at the company that can lead to radical simplifications that can reduce cost and improve performance at the same time.

They are also used to thinking beyond temporal boundaries. “This idea that the power of technology doubles every two years means that as you’re planning ahead you can’t think in terms of a linear process, you have to think in terms of huge jumps,” says Jay Ferro, CIO of TransPerfect, a New York–based global translation firm.

No wonder the SAP-Oxford transformation study found that one of the values transformational leaders shared was a tendency to look beyond silos and view the digital transformation as a company-wide initiative.

This will come in handy because in digital transformation, not only do business processes evolve but the company’s entire value proposition changes, says Jeanne Ross, principal research scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It either already has or it’s going to, because digital technologies make things possible that weren’t possible before,” she explains.

2. Work in Diverse Teams

When it comes to large projects, CIOs have always needed input from a diverse collection of businesspeople to be successful. The best have developed ways to convince and cajole reluctant participants to come to the table. They seek out technology enthusiasts in the business and those who are respected by their peers to help build passion and commitment among the halfhearted.

Digital transformation amps up the urgency for building diverse teams even further. “A small, focused group simply won’t have the same breadth of perspective as a team that includes a salesperson and a service person and a development person, as well as an IT person,” says Ross.

At Lenovo, the global technology giant, many of these cross-functional teams become so used to working together that it’s hard to tell where each member originally belonged: “You can’t tell who is business or IT; you can’t tell who is product, IT, or design,” says the company’s CIO, Arthur Hu.

One interesting corollary of this trend toward broader teamwork is that talent is a priority among digital leaders: they spend more on training their employees and partners than ordinary companies, as well as on hiring the people they need, according to the SAP-Oxford Economics survey. They’re also already being rewarded for their faith in their teams: 71% of leaders say that their successful digital transformation has made it easier for them to attract and retain talent, and 64% say that their employees are now more engaged than they were before the transformation.

3. Become a Consultant

Good CIOs have long needed to be internal consultants to the business. Ever since technology moved out of the glasshouse and onto employees’ desks, CIOs have not only needed a deep understanding of the goals of a given project but also to make sure that the project didn’t stray from those goals, even after the businesspeople who had ordered the project went back to their day jobs. “Businesspeople didn’t really need to get into the details of what IT was really doing,” recalls Ferro. “They just had a set of demands and said, ‘Hey, IT, go do that.’”

But that was then. Now software has become so integral to the business that nobody can afford to walk away. Businesspeople must join the ranks of the IT consultants. “If you’re building a house, you don’t just disappear for six months and come back and go, ‘Oh, it looks pretty good,’” says Ferro. “You’re on that work site constantly and all of a sudden you’re looking at something, going, ‘Well, that looked really good on the blueprint, not sure it makes sense in reality. Let’s move that over six feet.’ Or, ‘I don’t know if I like that anymore.’ It’s really not much different in application development or for IT or technical projects, where on paper it looked really good and three weeks in, in that second sprint, you’re going, ‘Oh, now that I look at it, that’s really stupid.’”

4. Learn Horizontal Leadership

CIOs have always needed the ability to educate and influence other leaders that they don’t directly control. For major IT projects to be successful, they need other leaders to contribute budget, time, and resources from multiple areas of the business.

It’s a kind of horizontal leadership that will become critical for businesspeople to acquire in digital transformation. “The leadership role becomes one much more of coaching others across the organization—encouraging people to be creative, making sure everybody knows how to use data well,” Ross says.

In this team-based environment, having all the answers becomes less important. “It used to be that the best business executives and leaders had the best answers. Today that is no longer the case,” observes Gary Cokins, a technology consultant who focuses on analytics-based performance management. “Increasingly, it’s the executives and leaders who ask the best questions. There is too much volatility and uncertainty for them to rely on their intuition or past experiences.”

Many experts expect this trend to continue as the confluence of automation and data keeps chipping away at the organizational pyramid. “Hierarchical, command-and-control leadership will become obsolete,” says Edward Hess, professor of business administration and Batten executive-in-residence at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. “Flatter, distributive leadership via teams will become the dominant structure.”

Q118 Feature3 img3 rock How Restaurants Can Survive Digital Disruption5. Understand Process Design

When business processes were simpler, IT could analyze the process and improve it without input from the business. But today many processes are triggered on the fly by the customer, making a seamless customer experience more difficult to build without the benefit of a larger, multifunctional team. In a highly digitalized organization like Amazon, which releases thousands of new software programs each year, IT can no longer do it all.

While businesspeople aren’t expected to start coding, their involvement in process design is crucial. One of the techniques that many organizations have adopted to help IT and businesspeople visualize business processes together is design thinking (for more on design thinking techniques, see “A Cult of Creation“).

Customers aren’t the only ones who benefit from better processes. Among the 100 companies the SAP-Oxford Economics researchers have identified as digital leaders, two-thirds say that they are making their employees’ lives easier by eliminating process roadblocks that interfere with their ability to do their jobs. Ninety percent of leaders surveyed expect to see value from these projects in the next two years alone.

6. Learn to Keep Learning

The ability to learn and keep learning has been a part of IT from the start. Since the first mainframes in the 1950s, technologists have understood that they need to keep reinventing themselves and their skills to adapt to the changes around them.

Now that’s starting to become part of other job descriptions too. Many companies are investing in teaching their employees new digital skills. One South American auto products company, for example, has created a custom-education institute that trained 20,000 employees and partner-employees in 2016. In addition to training current staff, many leading digital companies are also hiring new employees and creating new roles, such as a chief robotics officer, to support their digital transformation efforts.

Nicolas van Zeebroeck, professor of information systems and digital business innovation at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management at the Free University of Brussels, says that he expects the ability to learn quickly will remain crucial. “If I had to think of one critical skill,” he explains, “I would have to say it’s the ability to learn and keep learning—the ability to challenge the status quo and question what you take for granted.”

7. Fail Smarter

Traditionally, CIOs tended to be good at thinking through tests that would allow the company to experiment with new technology without risking the entire network.

This is another unfamiliar skill that smart managers are trying to pick up. “There’s a lot of trial and error in the best companies right now,” notes MIT’s Ross. But there’s a catch, she adds. “Most companies aren’t designed for trial and error—they’re trying to avoid an error,” she says.

Q118 Feature3 img4 fail How Restaurants Can Survive Digital DisruptionTo learn how to do it better, take your lead from IT, where many people have already learned to work in small, innovative teams that use agile development principles, advises Ross.

For example, business managers must learn how to think in terms of a minimum viable product: build a simple version of what you have in mind, test it, and if it works start building. “You don’t build the whole thing at once anymore.… It’s really important to build things incrementally,” Ross says.

Flexibility and the ability to capitalize on accidental discoveries during experimentation are more important than having a concrete project plan, says Ross. At Spotify, the music service, and CarMax, the used-car retailer, change is driven not from the center but from small teams that have developed something new. “The thing you have to get comfortable with is not having the formalized plan that we would have traditionally relied on, because as soon as you insist on that, you limit your ability to keep learning,” Ross warns.

8. Understand the True Cost—and Speed—of Data

Gut instincts have never had much to do with being a CIO; now they should have less to do with being an ordinary manager as well, as data becomes more important.

As part of that calculation, businesspeople must have the ability to analyze the value of the data that they seek. “You’ll need to apply a pinch of knowledge salt to your data,” advises Solvay’s van Zeebroeck. “What really matters is the ability not just to tap into data but to see what is behind the data. Is it a fair representation? Is it impartial?”

Increasingly, businesspeople will need to do their analysis in real time, just as CIOs have always had to manage live systems and processes. Moving toward real-time reports and away from paper-based decisions increases accuracy and effectiveness—and leaves less time for long meetings and PowerPoint presentations (let us all rejoice).

Not Every CIO Is Ready

Of course, not all CIOs are ready for these changes. Just as high school has a lot of false positives—genius nerds who turn out to be merely nearsighted—so there are many CIOs who aren’t good role models for transformation.

Success as a CIO these days requires more than delivering near-perfect uptime, says Lenovo’s Hu. You need to be able to understand the business as well. Some CIOs simply don’t have all the business skills that are needed to succeed in the transformation. Others lack the internal clout: a 2016 KPMG study found that only 34% of CIOs report directly to the CEO.

This lack of a strategic perspective is holding back digital transformation at many organizations. They approach digital transformation as a cool, one-off project: we’re going to put this new mobile app in place and we’re done. But that’s not a systematic approach; it’s an island of innovation that doesn’t join up with the other islands of innovation. In the longer term, this kind of development creates more problems than it fixes.

Such organizations are not building in the capacity for change; they’re trying to get away with just doing it once rather than thinking about how they’re going to use digitalization as a means to constantly experiment and become a better company over the long term.

Q118 Feature3 img6 CIOready How Restaurants Can Survive Digital DisruptionAs a result, in some companies, the most interesting tech developments are happening despite IT, not because of it. “There’s an alarming digital divide within many companies. Marketers are developing nimble software to give customers an engaging, personalized experience, while IT departments remain focused on the legacy infrastructure. The front and back ends aren’t working together, resulting in appealing web sites and apps that don’t quite deliver,” writes George Colony, founder, chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research, in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Thanks to cloud computing and easier development tools, many departments are developing on their own, without IT’s support. These days, anybody with a credit card can do it.

Traditionally, IT departments looked askance at these kinds of do-it-yourself shadow IT programs, but that’s changing. Ferro, for one, says that it’s better to look at those teams not as rogue groups but as people who are trying to help. “It’s less about ‘Hey, something’s escaped,’ and more about ‘No, we just actually grew our capacity and grew our ability to innovate,’” he explains.

“I don’t like the term ‘shadow IT,’” agrees Lenovo’s Hu. “I think it’s an artifact of a very traditional CIO team. If you think of it as shadow IT, you’re out of step with reality,” he says.

The reality today is that a company needs both a strong IT department and strong digital capacities outside its IT department. If the relationship is good, the CIO and IT become valuable allies in helping businesspeople add digital capabilities without disrupting or duplicating existing IT infrastructure.

If a company already has strong digital capacities, it should be able to move forward quickly, according to Ross. But many companies are still playing catch-up and aren’t even ready to begin transforming, as the SAP-Oxford Economics survey shows.

For enterprises where business and IT are unable to get their collective act together, Ross predicts that the next few years will be rough. “I think these companies ought to panic,” she says. D!


About the Authors

Thomas Saueressig is Chief Information Officer at SAP.

Timo Elliott is an Innovation Evangelist at SAP.

Sam Yen is Chief Design Officer at SAP and Managing Director of SAP Labs.

Bennett Voyles is a Berlin-based business writer.

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How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High-Tech Innovation

September 30, 2016   SAP

The lines between the digital and physical customer experience today are largely artificial. Customers shop in retail stores with their devices at the ready. They expect online-like personalization and recommendations in the aisles. They’re looking for instant gratification and better sensory experiences from digital channels. It’s an omnichannel world and companies must figure out how to live in it: delivering a superior customer experience regardless of the entry point.

Luxury fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff, for example, opened its first three retail stores with the intent of taking customers’ best online experiences and bringing them to life. “In the past, you had this brick-and-mortar experience, and you had the online experience,” says company president Uri Minkoff. “There were such great advantages and efficiencies that emerged with shopping online. You could get recommendations, see how something should be styled, create wish lists, access user-generated content. In the store, it was still just you and the product, and maybe a sales associate. But [unlike online] you had all five of your senses.”

Rebecca Minkoff’s new stores still stimulate those senses while incorporating some of the intelligence that online channels typically bring to bear. Each store features a large interactive screen at the entrance, where customers can browse products or order a beverage. Shoppers can interact with salespeople or they can make purchases on a mobile app without ever talking to a soul. Inside a fitting room, RFID-tagged merchandise is displayed on an interactive mirror, where customers can request new sizes or the designer’s recommended coordinates (a real-life recommendation engine).

The company has found that 30% of women ask for additional items based on the recommendations. It has also sold three times more of its new ready-to-wear line than it anticipated. “We were an accessories-dominant brand,” says Minkoff. “But we’ve been able to build this direct relationship with our customers, helping them with outfit completers and also getting a better sense of what they want based on what’s actually happening in our fitting rooms.”

Each piece of technology adds to the experience while capturing the details. Rebecca Minkoff’s integrated systems can remember a customer’s previous visits and preferred colors and sizes, and can enable associates to set up a fitting room with appropriate garments. On the back end, the company gets the kind of visibility into in-store conversions once possible only in digital transactions. “The technology gives us the ability to create the kind of experience each customer wants. She can shop anonymously or be treated like a VIP,” says Minkoff.

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images1 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech Innovation

Build Around a Big Idea

Rebecca Minkoff’s approach is a bellwether. It’s not enough simply to provide continuity or consistency from one channel to another. Customers don’t think in terms of channels, and neither should companies. Rather, it’s about defining the overarching experience you want to deliver to customers and then building the appropriate offline and online elements to achieve that intended outcome.

As more goods and even services are commoditized, companies must compete on the experiences they create (see The ROI of Customer Experience). That means coming up with a big idea that drives the design of the customer experience. “Every great experience needs to have a theme,” says Joe Pine, consultant and coauthor of The Experience Economy and Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier. “That’s the organizing principle of the experience. It’s how you decide what’s in and what’s out.”

For example, Rebecca Minkoff serves as an image consultant to its Millennial customers, who expect personalization, recognition, and tech innovation, using a mix of online and offline techniques. To stand apart, companies must come up with their own unifying idea and then integrate data and systems, rework organizational models, and rethink key strategic metrics and employee incentives in order to integrate the physical and digital worlds around that idea.

Here are some examples of companies that have created a theme-driven experience using online and offline elements.

Nespresso: Imparting a Sense of Luxury

At the most basic level, Nespresso is a manufacturer of coffee and coffee machines. But the company has successfully turned what it sells and how it sells it into a very specific type of experience. Nespresso strives to impart a feeling of quality, exclusivity, even luxury in a host of ways.

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images2 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech InnovationThe company has created the Nespresso Club, which maintains direct relationships with thousands of customers. Its customer service centers are staffed by 1,000 highly trained coffee experts who don’t just push products but offer advice and guidance as a sommelier might do with wine. Its 450 retail stores (up from just one Parisian in 2000) are called boutiques; the largely inventory-free showrooms are built around tasting and learning.

Online, the focus is on efficiency and service. Customers who prefer digital interactions can order through the web site or mobile app, which offers the option of courier delivery within a two-hour window. The company also recently introduced a Bluetooth-enabled coffee machine, which when paired with a smartphone app, can track a customer’s usage, simplify machine maintenance, and as Wired pointed out, enable remote brewing.

Success didn’t happen overnight, but today Nespresso is one of Nestlé’s fastest growing and most profitable brands, according to Bloomberg.

QVC: Using Online to Complement the Experience

The theme that has driven television-shopping giant QVC’s customer experience for decades has been “inspiration and entertainment.” Traditionally that was delivered through the joy of spontaneous discovery while watching the channel.

Matching that experience online has been difficult, however. At a digital retail conference in 2015, QVC’s CEO explained that in the past the company had failed to deliver the same rich interactions online that it had developed with its TV audiences, according to Total Retail. So the company decided to rethink its use of digital tools to focus on complementing the experience it delivers through TV screens, according to RetailWire.

For example, after enticing TV viewers with products, QVC introduces the next step in the buying journey—“impulse to buy”—in which viewers are spurred on with televised countdown clocks or limited merchandise availability. Online, the company has been experimenting with second-screen content (for instance, recipes that compliment a cooking product being sold on TV) to further propel purchases. The QVC app features the same item that is on-air along with a prompt that reveals all the items featured on TV in recent hours. On Apple devices equipped with Touch ID, customers can check out in less than 10 seconds with the fingerprint-enabled “speed buy” button. The third phase—“purchase and receive”—is complemented by a simple and reliable online browsing and purchasing platform. The last stage—“own and enjoy”—is accompanied by follow-on e-mail communication with tips on how to use products.

Last year, the company reported that 44% of total QVC sales came from online channels (up from 40% in 2014), and nearly half of those were completed on a mobile device. In fact, QVC is currently the tenth largest mobile commerce retailer in the United States, according to Internet Retailer.

Domino’s: Focusing on Speed and Convenience

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images3 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech InnovationDomino’s Pizza built a fast-food empire not necessarily on the quality of its pies but instead on the experience of getting hot food delivered quickly. What started out as a promise to deliver a pizza within 30 minutes to customers who phoned in their order is now a themed experience of efficient food delivery that can be fulfilled a number of ways. Domino’s AnyWare project enables customers to order pizzas from their TV, their Twitter account, their smartwatch, or their connected car, for starters. The Domino’s app features zero-click ordering functionality: Domino’s will start fulfilling the usual order for customers who opt in 10 seconds after opening the app.

Domino’s Australian stores are piloting GPS tracking whereby employees begin working on an order only when the customer enters the “cook zone”—a dynamically updated area around a given store that results in the customer arriving to a just-prepared order. The tool builds upon previously developed GPS-based technology for tracking delivery drivers, according to ZDNet. And the company that came up with the corrugated pizza box and the Heatwave Bag to keep pies warm is now building the DXP—a delivery car with a built-in warming oven. All in the name of the fast- and hot-food delivery experience.

Mohawk Industries: Using Social to Streamline Customer Interactions

Mohawk Industries grew to become a US$ 8 billion flooring manufacturer by relying on customers to visit its dealers’ retail locations to see, touch, and feel the carpet, hardwood, laminate, or tile they planned to purchase.

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images4 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech InnovationToday, instead of waiting for customers to find Mohawk, it has redesigned its experience to find them. It has adopted new technology and reworked its sales processes to reflect that new focus. The company’s 1,200 sales representatives have access to a 360-degree view of each customer, complete with analytics and sales tools on their tablets, enabling them to capture and follow through on leads generated through social media engagement.

By analyzing online discussions in real time, representatives can jump into the conversation and help customers find the product they may be searching for and direct the consumer to a retailer to finish the sale. In one episode, a woman was posting about her interest in a particular leopard rug on Twitter. Mohawk’s team surfaced the tweet, passed it on to a channel partner who contacted the woman and closed the sale within two minutes. Today, the company boasts an 80% close rate on sales started and guided in social media and has made $ 8 million on 14,000 such social leads. Mohawk Industries expects an increase of $ 25 million in sales year-over-year, thanks to its new customer-centric approach.

Customer Experience Design: Where to Begin

Developing a unique, valuable, and relevant customer experience that combines the best of offline and online capabilities is a huge undertaking. All corporate functions, including marketing, customer service, sales, operations, finance, and HR as well as product or business lines—all of which typically have competing metrics and agendas—must buy into the experience and collaborate to make it happen. And the ideal mix of digital and physical components will vary by company. But there are some best practices to get companies started on their own journeys.

Start at the Top

Without leadership buy-in, changes will not happen. “Customer experience is not a feature, it’s not a shiny button. It’s a concept that sometimes is tough to grasp. But we believe that if done right, it will keep customers loyal. And so we put a lot of effort into it,” says Kevin Scanlon, director of total customer experience at tech company EMC. “That’s why having that top-down support is paramount. If you don’t have it, you’re spinning your wheels. It’s going to give you the resources, the focus, and the attention that you need to design that consistent experience.”

To demonstrate its commitment, every VP and above at EMC has a customer experience metric as part of their quarterly goal.

Begin with the End in Mind

Companies can take a page from the design-thinking approach to product development, starting with the experience they want customers to have with their company and then putting in place the people, processes, and systems to make that happen across various touchpoints. Uber didn’t start by buying 1,000 cars. It started with a completely new customer experience it wanted to deliver—straddling the digital and physical—and then built the organization around that. Uber ultimately leveraged people, process, and technology to bring that to life, but it started with a unique customer journey.

Design for the Customer, Not the Company

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images5 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech InnovationTo date, most corporate processes have been designed for internal efficiency or cost savings with little consideration for the impact on the customer. Companies that want to design for consistent experiences have to reexamine those business processes from the customer perspective. In order to deliver a standout and consistent experience, enterprises must bring together an assortment of data from a variety of systems—including POS transactions, mobile purchases, call center activity, notes from sales calls, and social media.

The average retailer has customer data in more than a dozen different systems. But it’s not just the front-end customer-facing systems that need orchestrating; back office systems and processes, from your supply chain to fulfillment to customer service, must be designed to deliver the intended experience. For example, Nespresso has to orchestrate a number of back-end and front-end systems to offer customers premium courier delivery within two-hour windows.

Put Someone in Charge

Companies that are truly invested in creating integrated, standout customer experiences often create a centralized function that can bring together the people, processes, and technology to bring them to life. Sometimes there is a chief customer officer or head of customer experience. But unless these people are really empowered, they’re toothless.

EMC’s Scanlon is empowered. He heads up a function that has been transformed from focusing on product quality into a centralized customer experience center of excellence staffed with 60 full-time professionals. The center has translated into “more focus, more energy, more insight to our customers,” says Scanlon. “And we can deliver that insight to our internal stakeholders, which trickles down to our account teams and lets them have more meaningful conversations that benefit our customers—and benefit the company over time.”

Centralize Customer Data

Even if there is no central customer experience function, there needs to be a central data repository and analytics system: a digital foundation that everyone can use to improve their piece of that experience. EMC’s customer experience group has a data governance function that maintains a single source of customer truth. “They’re able to pull all relevant data sources into one location and get past the typical customer data challenges,” says Scanlon.

Invest in People

Companies that care about the customer experience invest in the people who deliver it. Human beings are the clearest signposts on the customer journey. Companies must hire the best, train for desired outcomes, and reward based on experience metrics: for being brand ambassadors and for going above and beyond on behalf of the customer.

sap Q316 digital double feature3 images6 How Restaurants Can Feast On The Growing Appetite For High Tech InnovationRethink Metrics and Incentives

One major bank was having trouble driving adoption of its online banking tools. The customers that used the tools loved them, but the tools weren’t getting traction. The problem? The branch managers had no interest in promoting digital banking. They wanted to drive as much traffic as possible to their physical branches because this was one of their key performance metrics.

The solution was to change the compensation approach in order to reward employees for the entire customer experience, including online banking adoption. Branch managers were measured on online and offline customer behavior in their regions. That became a single and critical KPI, and it boosted the desired behaviors and improved overall customer satisfaction.

Create a Single View of the Company

For years, companies have talked about the importance of understanding the customer. And that remains true, particularly when it comes to delivering a valuable customer experience online and off. But successful customer experience design is just as much about giving customers a clear understanding of the company through coordinated experiences that deliver on the brand’s theme and bring it to life in various ways in bricks and mortar, through devices, in online interactions, and everywhere in between. D!

Read more thought provoking articles in the latest issue of the Digitalist Magazine, Executive Quarterly.

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Baidu will soon let users review individual food dishes, not just restaurants

June 27, 2016   Big Data

Baidu, the equivalent of Google in China, will roll out an update to its group-buying ecommerce app, Nuomi, later this year. This will significantly change the way people review food — in addition to accepting and posting users’ reviews of restaurants, the app will start asking for people’s impressions of individual dishes.

Instead of having users simply snap photos and type in a few words later — and maybe upload photos — the app will also let people use voice dictation to quickly jot down their thoughts about the dishes they photograph. That way, users can receive more useful information about the specific foods they can order from restaurants.

Not that the app isn’t already intelligent: It’s collected so many food photos that when you upload a new dish, it identifies the dish and the restaurant. The company has data from hundreds of thousands of restaurants.

“I would say 90 percent of the dishes I think we are very well able to recognize,” Yuanqing Lin, director of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning in Beijing, told VentureBeat in an interview this week at Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Lab in Sunnyvale, California.

But the dish-level information could distinguish the app even more from other online-to-offline (O2O) services with which people can order car washes, laundry services, personal chefs, food delivery, and even massages on demand.

Baidu, which has more than 260 million monthly active users across its services, doesn’t have legions of people looking at photos to figure out what’s what in the photos added to the restaurant part of Nuomi, and there aren’t people in call centers who will be asking people what they think of the food they eat. The company is doing these things with deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as photos of food, and then getting them to make inferences about new data.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have all invested in deep learning, as well, and have released new features of their apps that take advantage of the technology. For instance, the Smart Reply feature of Google’s Inbox email app suggests one-line responses to incoming emails, and the Facebook app now offers machine-generated photo captions for the News Feed through the screen reader on iOS to help blind users understand what their Facebook friends are sharing.

Baidu uses deep learning for speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing for many of its applications. One example is the DuLight app that’s designed to help the blind. Based on what’s in front of the camera on a mobile device, the app can estimate the age and gender of a person, tell you the denomination of a piece of currency, turn printed text into speech that a blind person can listen to, and recognize objects.

The underlying A.I. systems get smarter as they sop up more data. So encouraging users to adopt a new behavior — talking into your phone at the table — might seem like something researchers thought up in a lab purely as a means to make their software smarter. But it’s more than that, because dish-level reviews in Nuomi (literally translated as “sticky rice” in Mandarin) could actually be useful to end users.

Over time, the app could become so smart about food that it will be able to tell users the best place to get a certain dish.

“I’m visiting the Bay Area,” Lin said. “If I open the app [looking for a] ranking of which restaurant in the area cooks the best Kung Pao chicken right now, there’s no such thing. So it could be extremely powerful for food recommendation.”

The idea is that the new version of Nuomi — which Baidu first acquired in 2014 from Renren — will catch people’s attention by virtue of its food knowledge and thereby get people to share more information. For example, if it sees a user uploading five photos, it could tell the user that it knows that the first dish is Kung Pao chicken, the second dish is sauteed eggplant, and so on. From there, the app will direct the user to push a photo in order to talk to the app and record their observations about the dish. The app will dutifully transcribe the user’s words and turn that into the text of the dish review.

Baidu will talk more about Nuomi’s dish-reviewing capability at its Baidu World conference coming up later this year, Lin said.

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