Restaurant Glossary
Contactless Dining
Restaurant space is full of words that one might not be familiar with, and the restaurant glossary is here to simplify it all for you. It will help you keep up with updated restaurant industry lingo.
What is contactless dining and how does it work?
It is a dining experience where customers spend less time interacting with employees and other customers. Through the use of technology, restaurants now offer tableside ordering, payment, and menu viewing for their customers.
There is less time spent in direct contact with outsiders, and no paper menus or receipts are exchanged.
This idea may seem a little odd because it turns the intimate and social nature of typical restaurant experiences on their head. However, in the pandemic era, contactless ordering, menus, and payment are only growing in popularity as visitors and restaurant workers prioritize safety. Customers may even prefer contactless dining to more traditional options.
What are the benefits of contactless dining?
- Lessens face-to-face interactions
Reduced face-to-face interaction between customers and restaurant workers is perhaps the most obvious and significant advantage of contactless dining. Restaurant staff trips back and forth from tables are drastically decreased due to contactless dining. When a consumer can browse a menu, place an order, and pay all by themselves, the staff only needs to arrive at the table once to deliver the food, which only takes a few seconds. Due to its human-intensive nature and reliance of people to interact with tangible objects at every stage of order, COVID-19 had essentially affected the hospitality sector a lot. Contactless dining eliminates the need for customers to touch menus, pens or receipts by simply using their own mobile instead..
- Decreases the number of surfaces that clients have to touch
As fewer items need to be touched by diners, thanks to contactless dining, restaurants are better able to adhere to the safety rules and standards. By lowering the number of touchpoints in your restaurant, contactless dining also makes dining-in a safer experience for the staff and guests. This gives guests more control over their dining experience which results in less downtime and quicker table turnover.
- Boosts the accuracy of orders
The fact that customers place their own orders is a major advantage of contactless ordering. Additionally, there is less chance that a waiter will get an order wrong or misinterpret certain instructions because consumers may choose, review, and submit their own orders. As a result, better order accuracy means your kitchen won’t waste time making an item out of order or the wrong dish, and customers won’t be dissatisfied.
How to set up a contactless dining experience at your restaurant?
With a large number of restaurants turning to contactless dining to protect their customers and employees, the food dining experience must be hygienic and aligned with improved measures.
- Set up integrated POS solution
Your POS system is the most significant piece of technology in any contactless dining arrangement. Your kitchen and digital menu are linked by this system. This software makes sure that when a customer orders something from your digital menu on their phone, the order is automatically entered into the POS system and sent straight to the kitchen so the back of house personnel can start preparing it.
- Create a digital menu
The next stage is to set up the contactless menu so that clients may browse and place orders once the appropriate software is in place. A digital menu is a necessity for the contactless eating experience because printed menus are one of the highest touch surfaces in any restaurant.
- Create custom QR codes for the menu
With a QR code menu, customers may access a digital version of your menu by scanning a special code with their smartphones. Customers may view your menu without entering in a URL by scanning the QR code at your restaurant. They don’t even need to download an additional app to scan your code because the majority of modern smartphones have a QR code reader integrated directly into the camera.
- Set up contactless payment
Contactless payment processing is the last yet an essential technological component of the contactless dining experience. A robust contactless dining feature is equipped with payment integrations that allow customers to pay directly through the application.
Use a payment processing system that enables you to accept CNP transactions if you want to make the payment process contactless and minimize face-to-face interactions with staff. It is crucial to ensure that the payment processing solution you’re using is integrated with your POS so that workers won’t have to manually mark bills as paid in your POS.