Over the past couple of years, as digital technologies have taken over the restaurant industry, a range of disparate solutions have emerged, leaving restaurateurs with a lot to keep track of. To alleviate the headaches this can create (and the inefficiencies and slow service), tech providers are racing to simplify owners and operators’ jobs with more comprehensive tools.
Marketing and commerce platform BentoBox, for one, debuted its new payments platform Wednesday (June 8), aiming to provide restaurants with an end-to-end solution for order-taking and payment processing.
Read more: BentoBox Debuts Payments Platform Solution for Restaurants
Krystle Mobayeni, co-founder of BentoBox and head of restaurants at its parent company Fiserv, explained in an interview with PYMNTS the chaotic experience that incompatible systems create for restaurateurs.
“Restaurant owners did not start restaurants in order to manage a tech stack,” Mobayeni said. “They started in order to be able to run their restaurant. … All technology providers for restaurants should be focused on consolidating and making it easier for the restaurant owner.”
Listing disparate tech platforms off the top of her head, Mobayeni noted that a restaurant may have one point-of-sale (POS) system, another direct online ordering platform, multiple third-party ordering platforms, an online reservation platform, a suite of email marketing tools, a website and digital menu builder, a gift card platform, a suite of accounting software and a different suite of staffing tools. She argued that the more tech providers can streamline these processes with integrated tools, the better they can meet their restaurant customers’ needs.
Balancing Act
These tangles of disparate solutions not only pose challenges for owners and operators; they also worsen the experience for the consumer. Mobayeni said a more unified tech suite “results in better hospitality and better service,” given that it enables restaurant workers to “spend their time focusing on serving the diner” rather than entering the same data multiple times into different systems or searching for a piece of information on multiple platforms.
On the consumers’ side, many diners are looking for a restaurant to strike the right balance of technology and service. Findings from the latest edition of PYMNTS and Paytronix’s Digital Divide series, “The Digital Divide: Technology, the Metaverse and the Future of Dining Out,” revealed that while 58% of grab-and-go consumers thought more technology inside restaurants — digital integrations such as QR code menus, kiosk ordering and digital order-ahead — meant better customer service, only 29% of dine-in consumers thought the same.
See more: Restaurants Tinker With Tech Recipe to Balance Efficiency and Personal Service
Additionally, the study, which drew from an April survey of nearly 2,500 consumers about their dining choices, payment partialities and sentiments on metaverse dining, found that older demographics — Generation X, baby boomer and senior restaurant customers — were far less likely to view such technologies as having a positive impact on their dining experience.
The How, Not the What
As more and more of the restaurant experience becomes digitized, businesses can gain access to more data about their customers’ preferences and behaviors. However, Mobayeni said, focusing on these data to the exclusion of other considerations can miss the point.
“I do think that this idea of data as a concept is a little bit overhyped,” she said. “There’s a certain set of more sophisticated restaurants that get a lot of power from the data itself and can do a lot with quote-unquote ‘data,’ but for most restaurants, it’s about the next step.”
Instead, she said, restaurants must focus on finding the tools that enable them to gain actionable insights from these data, whether that be through targeting promotions more effectively or improving loyalty program members’ experiences.
She added that the goal is to use these insights to build relationships with customers, “not … in a creepy way,” but rather to “anticipate their needs and create better hospitality.”
Is This Your Card?
Mobayeni noted that one of the key motivators for BentoBox’s new payments platform is that, with the rise of card-not-present (CNP) transactions, there are more fraud and chargeback issues, and when the tech provider has to direct its customers to third parties to address these issues, it worsens the customer experience.
Given that “such a large percentage of their [restaurants’] revenue” is coming from CNP transactions, she said, tools to address these issues should be “built into payments solutions” rather than “an afterthought.”
Additionally, Mobayeni predicted that these kinds of transactions are only going to become more popular going forward, making it all the more pressing for restaurants to have systems in place to address these challenges.
“We’’e going to be relying much more on card-not-present, less on swipes for restaurants, a lot more digital payments, mobile payments, an idea of having a saved profile, akin to when you checkout with Shopify,” she said. “Frictionless, no-touch, pay-and-go type of solutions are the direction that we’ll see the restaurant [industry] having landed in the next five-plus years.”
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