ITHACA N.Y. A comparison study of restaurant technologies found that consumers felt tableside displays of virtual menus with nutritional information to be the most valuable, followed by pagers for table management and hand-held point-of-sale terminals for line busting, Cornell University researchers said.
The recently released report, “Customer Preferences for Restaurant Technology Innovations,” authored by Michael Dixon, Sheryl E. Kimes, Ph.D., and Rohit Verma, Ph.D., was based on a summer 2008 survey of 1,737 consumers by the Center for Hospitality Research at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca.
The report is available to download at http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/2009.html .
“Restaurateurs need to make sure their customers will accept new technology when it is introduced, but we found a sort of catch-22,” co-author Verma said. “We found that people who use a particular technology find that technology more valuable than those who never tried it. However, to see that benefit the customer first has to try the technology, and many people aren't quick to try new technologies.”
To get past that obstacle, the report authors suggested, technology suppliers need to design devices and systems that appeal to consumers and are easy to use. Restaurateurs, they added, should be prepared to implement guest-training programs when deploying new consumer-facing technologies.
The authors said they also “noticed that the earlier dining-stage technologies,” such as virtual menus and pager systems, “seem to be preferred [by consumers] compared to later stages [such as] various payment options.” In general they said, consumers must have the perception that a new technology enhances their control of the service they receive, or it could meet resistance.
Survey respondents were briefed on 11 restaurant technologies with the potential to accelerate service or increase guest convenience or help operators reduce costs or increase sales. Respondents were asked to value each technology relative to lists of such devices or systems.
Researchers said that for the sake of clarity in quantifying the respondents’ relative technology preferences, they presented them in the form of percentages ranging from zero to 100. A score of 100 percent signified the most valuable technology, while zero indicated an unattractive technology, they said.
Using that method, the technology most valued by respondents, with a score of 100 percent, was a technology in very limited use today: tableside devices that display virtual menus with nutrition metrics for each item.
The next highest valued technologies among respondents were pagers for table management, with 91 percent; handheld point-of-sale-terminals used by restaurant employees to reduce lines in counter-service operations, 89 percent; and online-reservation systems, 87 percent.
Respondents to the survey were mostly well educated, having taken college classes or obtained degrees, researchers said. On average, they dine out 75 times a year and, most often, at quick-service establishments. People who answered survey questions were split evenly along gender lines, researchers noted, and younger respondents were more likely to have used more types of technologies than their older counterparts.
Beyond the four most valued technologies led by tableside virtual menu displays, researchers said the other technologies scored as follows: virtual menus online with nutritional information, with a score of about 77 percent; kiosk-based food ordering, 74 percent; kiosk-based payment, 66 percent; Internet-based ordering, 54 percent; payment via RFID-chip-enabled "smart" card, 36 percent; payment via SMS/text message, 9 percent; and payment via cell phone using near-field-chip wireless transmission technology, less than 1 percent.
Apart from their relative value survey, researchers asked respondents about their use, if any, of the 11 technologies investigated. Pagers systems had been used by 56 percent of the respondents and online-reservations systems by 32 percent, they said.
About 27 percent of the respondents said they had benefited from restaurant employee use of handheld POS for line busting, used Internet-based ordering systems or viewed online virtual menus with nutrition information. Approximately 24 percent said they have used kiosk-based ordering devices, 22 percent said they had used kiosk-based payment systems, and about 18 percent reported that they have operated tableside displays of virtual menus with nutrition metrics.
Less than 8 percent of the respondents said they have used “smart” payment cards, and about 4 percent said they have settled their dining tab using a cell phone with NFC technology or by way of text message.
Researchers said they found that the average value score for a technology increased significantly – by between 13 percent and 41 percent – among respondents who had actually tried the technology in question.
Contact Alan J. Liddle at [email protected].