Consumers Ready For Enhanced Technology From Restaurants

Con­sumers expect more tech­nol­o­gy from restau­rants and food retail­ers.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Tech­nom­ic, a research and con­sul­tan­cy firm for the food ser­vices indus­try, has released the results of a sur­vey which sug­gests that con­sumers expect more tech­nol­o­gy from restau­rants and food retail­ers. In par­tic­u­lar, the sur­vey revealed demand for four areas ready for enhanced tech­nol­o­gy: loy­al­ty pro­grams, free Wi-Fi, online order­ing, and mobile pay­ments.


The Con­sumer Brand Met­rics sur­vey revealed that, par­tic­u­lar­ly among mil­len­ni­als, there is demand for greater tech­no­log­i­cal inte­gra­tion for con­sumers in the food retail and restau­rant indus­try.

Ear­li­er this year, Domi­no’s intro­duced the abil­i­ty to order piz­za via emo­jis, enabling peo­ple to order a piz­za with a few mere clicks. Per­haps this con­tributed to Domi­no’s top­ping the Tech­nomic’s con­sumer sur­vey for restau­rants lead­ing the way with tech­nol­o­gy:

technomic-restaurant

Domi­no’s also scored the high­est in a mea­sure of inte­gra­tion of tech­nol­o­gy with quick-ser­vice, with 60 per­cent of respon­dents rat­ing the lev­el of their tech­no­log­i­cal inte­gra­tion as “very good.”

For many restau­rants, there is clear­ly still ground to make up, and the sur­vey revealed that mil­len­ni­als placed a heavy empha­sis on the abil­i­ty to track loy­al­ty points and rewards, as well as the abil­i­ty to make a mobile pay­ment – a fea­ture which the major­i­ty of restau­rant brands have yet to intro­duce.

Anoth­er notable win­ner in the sur­vey was The Habit Burg­er Grill, whose ease of online order­ing saw the brand rank­ing high­est in the area of order­ing tech­nol­o­gy, with 58 per­cent of respon­dents rat­ing it as “very good”.

Over­all, of all the respon­dents sur­veyed, only 13 per­cents of con­sumers con­sid­ered a brand to real­ly excel in tech­nol­o­gy across all seg­ments.

Ben and Jer­ry’s was the biggest win­ner amongst this group, which seems to have won over con­sumers with its Eupho­ria Rewar­dia loy­al­ty pro­gram.

It sug­gests that enhanc­ing the abil­i­ty to track loy­al­ty points and earn dis­counts could be one of the biggest wins for brands in the sec­tor to increase the con­sumer per­cep­tions of tech­no­log­i­cal pro­vi­sion.

Tech­nol­o­gy-friend­ly ser­vice in restau­rants has become impor­tant to con­sumers broad­ly, and to Mil­len­ni­als and Gen­er­a­tion Z cus­tomers, it’s essen­tial,” said Colleen Roth­man, man­ag­er of con­sumer insights for Tech­nom­ic in a inter­view with The Nation­al Restau­rant News. “Con­sumers will con­tin­ue to look to piz­za chains and fast-casu­al brands for the lat­est and great­est dig­i­tal plat­forms, but they also will expect all restau­rants to inte­grate many tech­nolo­gies that have become a fact of dai­ly life every­where.”


Do you agree with the results of the sur­vey? What key areas do you think restau­rants need to enhance tech­no­log­i­cal pro­vi­sion?

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

Discover why brands and agencies choose Linkdex

  • Get started fast with easy onboarding & training
  • Import and connect data from other platforms
  • Scale with your business, websites and markets
  • Up-skill teams with training & accreditation
  • Build workflows with tasks, reporting and alerts

Get a free induction and experience of Linkdex.

Just fill out this form, and one of our team members will get in touch to arrange your own, personalised demo.