With the digital proliferation of the past couple of years, restaurants are growing frustrated with the tangle of incompatible software solutions aiming to make the process of running an eatery easier, leaving an opportunity for providers who can offer a way to unify these disparate processes. Noting this opportunity, Yelp announced Wednesday (Sept. 29) that it is launching Yelp Guest Manager, which consolidates front-of-house tools into a single product.
“At Yelp, we recognize that restaurants need a partner that helps streamline operations, allowing staff to focus on serving their diners and providing great customer service,” Anthony Cross, vice president of product for Yelp for Restaurants, said in the company’s blog post. “Yelp is launching Yelp Guest Manager, bringing Yelp for Restaurants front-of-house products and features together into one comprehensive solution.”
Features included in the solution or available as an add-on are reservation and waitlist integrations, table management, point of sale (POS) integrations, off-premises order tracking and self-check-in tools for customers. The solution also offers an integration with loyalty platform Punchh and with digital ordering platform Olo.
Along with these features, Yelp also announced a Virtual Restaurants attribute to make it clear to consumers when a restaurant is off-premises-only, with no consumer-facing physical presence.
The Context
The need to consolidate is pressing. Outlining the “key complexities that hinder restaurants’ digital transformation progress,” Olo described the issue in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in advance of its initial public offering (IPO) earlier this year.
See also: Olo Highlights Five Key Takeaways In S-1 Filing For IPO
“Restaurant brands historically have not standardized the type of technology platforms that must be deployed across their locations,” the SEC filing states. “For example, in our survey, 70 percent of respondents indicated they use two to four different technology providers to collect orders across various channels.”
Additionally, the filing went on to say that “legacy restaurant systems were not built for modern, cloud-based environments … furthermore, brands are unable to access their consumer data, as it resides in different systems and databases that cannot communicate with each other.”
In Recent News
Throughout 2021, ResTech companies have been announcing initiatives that aim to accomplish many of the same goals as Yelp Guest Manager, simplifying restaurants’ digital presences with tools that integrate previously incompatible software. At the forefront of this movement have been POS providers, which have been integrating not just front- but also back-of-house tools into their products.
Read more: POS Providers Compete To Be Restaurants’ One-Stop Shop
There have also been more niche efforts, with tech providers aiming not to meet all the needs of all restaurants, but to specialize to meet all the needs of a subset of restaurants. Take Slice, a company that provides technology solutions for independent pizza restaurants.
“Horizontal solutions are incredibly broad and shallow in the way that they solve problems,” Slice CEO Ilir Sela told PYMNTS in an interview. “None of these solutions truly solve the end-to-end problems that are specific to each vertical … It’s incredibly fragmented and the reason why the fragmentation is there is because none of them really are solving the true problems that exist, which is end-to-end vertical integration.”
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