Your restaurant staff are your biggest asset for onsite marketing and have a significant influence over guests’ use of any in-store digital solution. It is essential that front-of-house teams are properly trained on how to walk customers through the process, and field any questions they might have. This is particularly the case for order & pay at table, which is still a very disruptive technology and for some guests, may be their first encounter with the solution. By using staff to reinforce the use of order & pay at table, guests should start to appreciate its many benefits – such as taking control of the pace of their dining experience and being able to customize their order in their own time. If you have ambitious Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to meet, it’s doubly important to make sure that staff are proactively encouraging guests to use the solution.
Some employees may be sceptical about the objectives behind technology for guest self-service, with fears over operators’ intentions to replace man with machine. However, in most instances a reduction in staff is not the aim nor the end result, with bottom line gains for mobile order & pay solutions brought about through an elimination of chargebacks, increased table turns and bolstered brand loyalty.
As well as reiterating that at table solutions are not there to trim the staff count, here are a few other angles you might want to take with your staff discussions to help encourage, excite and motivate them to get on board with the solution and ultimately, drive guest adoption:
- Consider explaining to staff how mobile order & pay at table can make their day-to-day jobs easier, especially during peak times, by allowing guests to pay themselves without having to wait for a free member of staff, or available card reader.
- Show staff how mobile order & pay at table at table can allow them to spend more time, and better-quality time, with guests who need or prefer face-to-face assistance.
- Illustrate how an increase in designated floor sections, brought about by the solution, can lead to increased tips for wait staff.
- Get the whole team involved with the launch. Provide training that equips the front and back-of-house with the tools required to provide assistance and create a buzz around the tech.
- Incentivizing: During the first month of launch, offer a cash incentive for the employee of the week that has driven the most guests to use mobile order & pay at table, or the employee that proved most helpful when fielding customers’ mobile questions. At the corporate level, you may also want to consider incentivizing managers by allocating a store target for pay at table conversions correlated to the employee of the week result. For example, this could be an award for a manager whose store averages an employee of the week top score, within a two-week period of the initial employee reaching it.
- Provide employees with all the tools they need to be successful when it comes to order & pay at table. This could include training manuals and FAQ documents, allowing staff to use, play around with and familiarize themselves with the technology, and a script that allows them to talk about the solution confidently.
It is important to remember that staff buy-in doesn’t start and stop pre-launch. Continual communication with employees, making them feel part of the initiative, cementing the reasons why mobile at table improves their lives and offers them benefits, needs to happen throughout and well after deployment.
For tips on how to get C-level buy-in to your digital self-service solution, click here.
