Restaurateurs Order up Omnichannel

Many merchants speak of the gains to be made by fusing in-store with digital commerce. Now, quick-service and fast-casual restaurants are turning to a variety of hardware to make it happen.

CKE Restaurants Inc., parent of the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains, and TGI Fridays Inc. are using Microsoft Corp. technology to speed up the ordering and purchase process in their restaurants, the Redmond, Wash.-based computing giant announced last month.

Carrollton, Texas-based TGI Fridays is putting 8-inch tablets into the hands of servers that they can use to process orders and payments at tables. Dubbed “Fridays Service Style,” the technology operates on Microsoft Windows 8.1, the chain says.

The tablets are made by Dell Inc. and use Oracle’s well-known Micros restaurant point-of-sale software.

Microsoft says the tablets accept mag-stripe cards now, though TGI Fridays has plans to offer Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card and near-field communication (NFC) acceptance in the future.

TGI Fridays completed a six-city test in Texas and Minnesota, and plans to outfit 80 additional restaurants with the technology. It expects to have more than 2,000 tablets deployed by March.

The chain says there are a number of benefits to using the tablets. First, customers can swipe their cards at their tables, so the card never leaves their hands.

“Secondly, the tablets inherently increase the number of devices that are available at any given time, eliminating the need for servers to wait for [point-of-sale] machines and speeding up the checkout process,” says Tripp Sessions, TGI Fridays vice president and chief information officer, in an email.

He adds that the impending EMV migration was not a factor, and that the tablets require no integration because the company’s existing point-of-sale system uses Windows 8.1, too.

CKE Restaurants has taken a different approach. It is testing self-service kiosks in 30 restaurants, with plans to add additional sites in the next few months.

These devices enable consumers to place orders and pay for their meals, bypassing the ordering line at the counter. The company even built a restaurant in Nashville, Tenn., centered on the kiosk. There, CKE Restaurants says one-third of customers use the devices.

Other quick-service and sit-down restaurant companies have used tablets, kiosks, and smart phones as mobile ordering and payment devices. Smokey Bones Bar & Fire Grill, for example, is installing a tabletop tablet-POS system from Dallas-based Ziosk LLC in all 65 of its U.S. locations. And Ziosk has installed its device throughout the Chili’s Grill & Bar chain of casual restaurants.

In at least the TGI Fridays and CKE Restaurants instances, the use of mobile and kiosk devices is less about payments, says Julie Conroy, research director at Boston-based advisory firm Aite Group, than it is about gaining efficiencies by blending what has traditionally been two channels—in-store and digital—into one.

“This is less about the mobility of payments and more about the much-talked-about omnichannel user experience,” Conroy says in an email. “In both cases, these firms are blurring the lines between the traditional physical store and the digital channel, and in the TGI Fridays case, the tablet also brings a ‘cool factor’ to the user experience.”

It’s this potential to merge all of the channels consumers use to interact with a company that excites merchants, she says. This can help merchants better understand their consumer interactions and get cost and pricing information from one source.

Says Conroy: “Omnichannel has been a term almost as overused as ‘big data,’ but these examples show why there is so much excitement about the potential to merge multiple channels of engagement and make substantive improvements to the business.”

—Kevin Woodward