The ongoing corona crisis has seen a massive upsurge of restaurant technology in the UAE, which has lead to a high number of restaurant owners to immensely automate their entire operations. Initially, the apprehension existed, and restaurateurs took time to accept the shift to the new-age restaurant technology trends. However, now the dimensions have changed evidently, and restaurateurs have concluded that leveraging on restaurant technology is the only way that will help the restaurants bolster their profits in the competitive F&B space.
Upcoming Restaurant Technology Trends In UAE
Restaurants in UAE will witness restaurant technology that will help the business scale like never before. Below we have listed six upcoming restaurant technology trends that will impact the restaurant industry in UAE in a big way.
1. Online Delivery
The concept of online delivery is on a massive rise, and it will continue to be so in the upcoming year as well. With a spike in online deliveries and cloud kitchens, if your restaurant doesn’t follow the trend and comes with a stellar delivery-only menu, you will lose out more than you can realize. Hence, restaurants in UAE will increasingly integrate themselves with the various online delivery platforms, which will help them increase their online sales exponentially.
Considering the predicament of the situation, there will be many more such online delivery platforms coming in the F&B space of UAE, to harness the potential of the huge business that it holds. As a restaurant owner, you should integrate yourself with the various online delivery platforms and get on board a robust restaurant management system that will help you receive all the orders in one central place. This will ensure that you do not miss out on any of the orders that come from the various delivery platforms for mere human negligence.
2. Build A Strong Customer Relationship Management
With the stiff competition that prevails in the UAE restaurant space, it makes it imperative that you build a band of loyal customers. Only engaging in robust customer relationship management will help you achieve this goal of yours. Restaurants will strive hard to create a robust CRM.
This can be done by bringing in the concept of taking feedback from your customers. If you build a restaurant feedback app, it will not only be convenient for your restaurant staff and the customer to go through the process but once this app is integrated with the restaurant POS, all the customer data will get updated in the central CRM. Such automation will not only help you reduce your labor cost, but will also nullify the instances of manual mistakes.
If you have a website or a mobile ordering app, try and sync it with the restaurant POS, this will help you catch all the information of all the customers who place an order through the app. From the information garnered you can run personalized loyalty programs. The concept of customized loyalty programs will receive great momentum in 2019, and this will bolster the restaurant’s efforts to retain customers.
3. Automating Marketing
With the growing competition, almost all restaurants in UAE are understanding the importance of running stellar restaurant marketing campaigns. It is marketing that will keep the restaurants in mind and sight of the customers. Hence restaurants will be readily looking for a complete restaurant marketing automation system. Such robust systems will help you run personalized and customized marketing campaigns from the information gathered in the CRM. Not only personalized, but you can also even run outlet-specific marketing campaigns.
Personalized and targeted efforts have always proved to be more beneficial for attracting the attention of the customers. Provide them with customized offers and discounts depending on their ordering history. Send special greetings to your customers on special days like birthdays and anniversaries, with a special gift or a discount coupon this will automatically help you get the customers back at your restaurant. Restaurants in the coming years will look for restaurant technology that will help them to automate their marketing efforts immensely.
4. End-to-End Restaurant Management Solution
With the scale at which the restaurant industry in UAE is expanding, restaurants will be on the lookout for a robust restaurant management system that will help in the complete automation of the restaurant operations. A system, that will provide end-to-end restaurant management from billing, inventory, CRM, to ensuring that internal theft and pilferage is kept at bay through detailed reporting of sales, marketing, stock, and the like will ensure that you have tight control over your restaurant operations remotely.
5. Going Cashless
Most of the restaurants in the UAE F&B space will be looking for an option for cashless payment methods. This will help the customers to leave the wallets back home. Service developers are introducing innovative ways, like, facial recognition payment systems. In San Francisco, Amazon Go has introduced a facial recognition mode of payment in a store. A number of cameras are installed, and once a customer walks inside the store the camera captures the person. And all the customer needs to do is get the products needed and simply walk out of the store. The intelligent system deducts the amount of the goods purchased from the customer’s Amazon Wallet. This makes it easy for the store owner to run the store with limited staff.
It will not be shocking if the UAE restaurant market, which is striving hard to counter the high attrition rate, plans to go cashless, which will reduce the dependency on the labor exponentially. While self-service kiosks are already scaling at a massive scale, we are hoping to witness the concept of facial recognition mode of payment coming in and making a mark in the UAE restaurant space.
6. Robot Staff
In order to counter the high employee attrition rate, several restaurants and hotels in UAE, especially in Dubai have adopted the robot staff concept quite successfully. And this is exactly what we predict will gain an enormous boost in the upcoming year. Not only will such actions reduce dependency on manual labor, but they will also help you increase your restaurant’s efficiency by ten folds. This will have a direct impact on increasing your customer satisfaction and thus will help you in increasing your profits.
The Middle East can be solely defined by the hospitality industry alone. Hence, restaurants are always on the lookout for new and innovative trends that will keep them ahead of the others in the market. The trends that we have predicted to tantalize the restaurant industry will be readily accommodated by the restaurants in their upcoming year’s strategic planning.
Keep the trends mentioned above in mind and implement them aptly that will help you increase your customer trail base and keep your cash registers overflowing.
