The last 2-3 years have given us so much to learn and adapt and among them, one of the changes that it has brought was the technological advancements across sectors and industries. Restaurant business that has always attracted a large number of investments and has forever been the attention point for investors and entrepreneurs has also embraced technology like never before. When the lockdown happened throughout the country and restaurants had to shut down, what they could rely upon was on delivery and that’s where technology played a role. Even after the opening of restaurants, the tech experience got boosted with the adoption of QR-based ordering, payments, online delivery, robot serving foods, and voice-based ordering to name a few, giving the physical experience a ‘phygital’ experience altogether. 

It all began in 2011 when Parthiv Patel together with Apurv Patel started Petpooja as a food delivery platform for corporates. With this business model, they achieved a respectable mark in two years: serving over 200 corporates by partnering with 300+ restaurants. But, in the process, they realized that because of the lack of appropriate technology, there were tremendous operational inefficiencies and the restaurant processes were not scalable. A close look at these restaurants’ daily struggles led them to innovate the brand into a coherent 'restaurant management software'.

From providing an operating system to restaurants that include inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), online ordering, payments, and analytics, Petpooja’s software provides service to over 25,000 restaurants across India, UAE, and Africa, with over 1.5 million daily orders logged on the platform recording an annualized gross merchandise value of $2.5 billion.

Building an Omnichannel Approach

Before starting a business and going into the deep, there’s always a question in an entrepreneur’s mind on which channel should they build their brand on. In the last 2-3 years, we have seen businesses expand themselves in the online space to a larger extent. Also, brands/players that were into an offline setup have entered into the online space.

“Every channel is important to engage with customers but we have seen more and more hybrid approach is coming when opening a brand,” said Parthiv Patel Co-Founder, Petpooja by adding that a typical cloud-kitchen with an only online presence has the highest failure rate as compared to a hybrid concept that has both online and offline presence.

Also, if you look at examples and data, in the last 2-3 years we have seen many brands like Anjan Chatterjee’s Speciality Restaurants, Impresario Handmade Restaurants, and Foodlink Restaurants enter into the delivery/cloud-kitchen segment.

Customer Engagement is the Key

The first and most important thing for a brand is to connect with the right set of customers. And as a brand, you need to reach out to them through every possible channel - SMS, social media, Whatsapp, email, and so on. Also, when we look at large restaurant organizations; they are always keen on building customer relationships and are poised for marketing and experimenting with techniques and ideas. But for smaller brands where they do not want to focus on marketing and customer engagement; it is the need of the hour. And, that’s where the loyalty apps, CRM, POS, etc enter into the market to scale the business to connect to the new set of customers so at the end of the day you can deliver a fantastic experience to the customer.

Content is the Power

“Seamless integration is important. You have to literally build gold content before posting it online. Many a time what we have seen is that brand has ignored the content creation forgetting that it is the base, it has to go with the brand,” added Patel who is also trying to solve that problem through one more product where restaurants can choose the content according to their need and post it on social platforms and across media to market them well.

 Automation is the Need of the Hour

Gone are the days when brands used to rely on humans. It’s the era of digitization and automation. From robots serving your favorite food at the restaurant to technologies managing operations and order management, the whole ecosystem of the food business has changed. Also, many times people think that automation means removing humans but it is about working in tandem with them. Nobody ever thinks that what would be the cost per order at the scale and that’s where brands are struggling. For eg; IT managers at restaurants were always focusing on what they needed in terms of what is the requirement at the restaurant but they never focused on what was required. Hence, we can say that customization is easy to build, difficult to maintain. And, that’s where automation enters.

To enhance customer experiences, restaurants started adopting and innovating the same with new technologies and that’s where conversational AI and messaging came into existence to take the whole experience to newer heights. Players like Gupshup that sensed the growing appetite for conversational AI and messaging have been a key player in transforming the whole experience.

As per reports, the global enterprise messaging industry accounted for 2.7 trillion messages in 2020 and we all couldn’t deny the fact that messaging is a great medium for engagement. It’s instant, and users tend to be much more responsive to messages compared to other media. They also tend to use messaging apps multiple times a day. And, that’s how they worked with the restaurant industry helping transform through conversational AI and messaging.

Transforming the Customer Experience

“Restaurant business is all about customer experience. A lot of you run restaurants but as consumers, we all will want our favorite restaurant to know a lot about us, a lot of our differences and if we are trying a new restaurant, we would not step into it if we find that the reviews or the word of mouth are negative. So, it’s really important for the restaurant business to get the customer experience right,” said Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan, VP- Marketing, Gupshup that has brands like Zomato, Radisson Group, Coffee Bean 7 Tea Leaf, Mahesh Lunch Home to name a few as key partners.

If we look at the response a restaurant gets, digital experience has changed the whole ecosystem. For eg; AR menu, app-less ordering, click-bill pay, omnichannel CRM, and voice technology have all changed consumer behavior.

“I believe that the pandemic has probably crunched maybe 5-7 years of digitization cycle,” added Vijayaraghavan who believes that conversational AI has transformed the whole consumer experience.

Also, if we dig deep, the nature of a restaurant owner is to converse with their customers as business has been done today or always through conversations. So, with conversational AI there is the ability to completely digitalize all three facets of the restaurant business which we call; pre-purchase where you have lots of marketing and promotions, purchase which is payments and ordering and post-purchase which is sustaining the relationship with your customer, getting them to order more frequently and getting them to provide feedback and reviews on the third party and all of these can be digitized with the power of conversational AI.

How Does This Work in Action?

“Some of the important things that you can do with conversational AI is to do personalize digital nudges to order. With this technology, you can get restaurants to have a lot of personalized nudges to get an order from you online. So, you can run an SMS campaign with a link to order, you can even launch a WhatsApp campaign to your database and if you have a great following on Instagram you can also do the same with Instagram or any other messaging channel where you have a great number of followers,” he added by pointing that the first application of conversational AI is to create these digital nudges to get customers to order from your restaurant.

Restaurants can also adopt these technologies at their physical outlet to make it more competitive because it’s not just that the restaurant will become a cloud-kitchen overnight but will also have to enhance its physical experience like QR-based ordering and payments where the customer is at the restaurant but is using the digital methods to place an order, payments, etc while they are at restaurant premises. So, once a restaurant has done the nudging, ordering, etc it’s also important to continue the conversation with their customer and that’s where the real power of digital comes in/ conversational AI comes in.

Why You Should Invest in Conversational AI?

In order to enhance the customer experience, it’s very important to invest in conversational AI as it transforms the whole consumer experience. It can help a restaurant in three ways; It can help you to deliver a very personalized experience to thousands of customers, it is applicable to a variety of workflows and use cases in the restaurant segment and it can help you scale your business by finding new customers and support them.

Though the pandemic has been a watershed moment for the restaurant at foodservice sector at large, digital adoption is the need of the hour as consumers these days are looking for digital touch-points, contactless dining/ ordering, and delivery as a major innovation. Given the current industry outlook and the evolution, large-scale technology adoption is imperative to increase the efficiency of operations, control pilferage, manage online channels and keep costs under control.