In the hospitality industry, the customer experience is obviously critical. Part of the customer experience in dine-in facilities is their physical comfort, and part of our SiteSage solution helps to ensure consistently comfortable restaurant temperatures through our enterprise-wide control and diagnostics of heating and cooling systems.
However, as restaurants rebuild their revenue streams in our new normal, “customer comfort” is taking on new dimensions. In particular, customer comfort includes the sense for restaurant guests that restaurants are taking active measures to minimize any exposure to Covid or other bugs that could cause illness. In particular, we’re seeing an acceleration in the adoption of technologies such as contactless ordering systems. In addition, the plexiglass manufacturers are having a heyday making screens to safely separate customers and employees at the counter.
This heightened customer awareness of the risk in dining out or getting take-out food also affects how restaurant operators think about transparency and reducing risk in their operations. Is food being stored, prepared, and handled safely? Is the equipment involved in these operations performing well – and being used properly by the staff? Are my refrigeration units keeping temperatures within the “safe zone”?
Senior leadership at many restaurant brands are asking more and more for remote visibility into these kinds of questions. A recent article in Franchise Times discusses this trend, which is accelerating from the desire of leadership to have this visibility combined with the constraint of limited ability to visit restaurants in-person.
Innovative restaurant groups are embracing technologies that enable this remote transparency, which in turn helps them continue to deliver a comfortable customer experience – even as the definition of “comfort” continues to evolve in our new reality.
Interested in learning how to apply SiteSage to your foodservice operations to improve customer comfort, reduce risk, and provide remote visibility to your leadership? Send us a note!