Opinion: customer experience and technology

Let me start with a very simple question: as a restaurant owner, what is the most important to you? Increasing your margins, increasing your turnover or having happy customers?

What is most important for me as a restaurateur is, by far, happy customers.

And I have a breaking news for you: customers don’t like to pay in restaurants. As a customer you don’t like to wait for a taxi or for your bill for 10 minutes!

As CEO of sunday I am not going to talk about tech but about how to increase the quality of customer experience.

To make a living and enjoy this job, you need one thing: your restaurant has to be full. And the first thing you need to be full is not tech to make reservations, to improve your online visibility or to improve your orders; you need to have happy customers. A customer is not happy because of a booking system, he is happy because he has a great experience. Not a good meal, a good experience, good service.

In a restaurant, you don’t feed people, for that you have Tesco, Gorillas, or Napoli Gang.

No one goes to a restaurant because otherwise they’ll starve, we go to a restaurant to have a good time, to have a good experience. The customer experience can, in my view, be summed up simply: good, cheap, served with a smile, in a nice place.

If you achieve this, then your customers are happy, and your restaurant is full.

Therefore I want to use technology to remove everything that is annoying and improve everything that is great in the experience.

What is a pain for everyone (customers, waiters and restaurant owners)? Paying at the restaurant.

Now QR codes are as obvious as salt & pepper. They allow the payment process to go from 15 minutes to 10 seconds. And the good news is it allows more human contact. It could remove the “Did it go well?” at the end of the meal and have you already answered “it was shit!” Even those who put one-star reviews on Tripadvisor don’t say “it’s shit” in person. They lie. The customer doesn’t want to say if it went badly, he wants to leave at that moment. And the waiter gains plenty of time to talk to the clients. There’s no need to wait until the end of the meal to know if it went well.

It allows your staff to save 30% time, and spend 100% of their time taking care of the customers and offering them the best customer experience.

The gains are not only for the end consumer: the staff gets 40% more tips and the restaurant owner sees their tables turn 15 minutes faster and their average basket increase by 12%.

To me the perfect tech for me must be good for all stakeholders:

– First the customers, the most important

– Then the staff, in the dining room and in the kitchen

– And finally the restaurant owner.

Victor Lugger is co-founder of Big Mamma Restaurants and sunday