Transform the quick-service restaurant experience

Today’s quick-service restaurants are faced with unprecedented change. In addition to delivering the digital experience customers increasingly expect for everything from reservations to payments, they also need to ensure a safe and healthy restaurant environment, build brand loyalty outside the traditional physical setting, and meet the operational requirements of the new normal.

Change through technology is critical

That means restaurants need to embrace the technology that will:

Enable safe and healthy interactions. Restaurants are pivoting to contactless forms of engagement to ensure the health and safety of customers and employees, including no-touch mobile menu solutions or ordering powered by facial recognition. They’re also leveraging automation and robotics to ensure hygiene and support ongoing operations, despite having a reduced on-site workforce.

Technologies that enable contactless interactions include QR-code-based touchless or contact-less menus, mobile PoS systems for payments, IoT sensors for no-touch interactions, biometric devices with smart cameras for face detection and temperature checking, and voicebots and chatbots for ordering and smart-word detection.

Adapt business models to new needs. Restaurants that have done well despite the decline in physical visits have been able to offer differentiated customer experiences via drive-through ordering, take out, and/or home delivery. One leading brand used an existing digital platform to allow customers to buy groceries, while others have invested in curbside pick-up technology that enabled remote ordering and payment. These examples demonstrate the importance of having mature and robust digital platforms that can respond to change, quickly.

Continue to build brand loyalty programs. The rapid shift to online means digital loyalty programs and robust CRM systems have been lifelines for restaurants, enabling convenient online ordering and customer incentives. Restaurants need to respond to the increasing desire for customers to have a say in the rewards they earn, whether mobile wallet points or discounted fuel offers.

Domain-driven design: the key to making change happen

Restaurants need digital platforms that allow them to build out new capabilities and services. Domain-driven design is key to this. Domain-driven design is a proven software methodology for aligning development to business needs. It works by describing business systems as a set of abstract models that can then be implemented in various software languages. This strategic emphasis keeps teams focused on what’s most important, which is crucial in countering the “everything is critical” mindset that can impede software development efforts.

There are three key steps to a domain-driven approach that restaurants should take as they transform.

1. Prioritization: Determine which domains are critical for business success. These consist of core functionality that are either brand differentiators or those without which the business would fail. For example, in the quick-service restaurant sphere, domains can include menu, order, loyalty, offer, kitchen, and accounts. In today’s environment, many restaurants are focusing on the order and loyalty domains to retain customers. Certain restaurants have been able to thrive with safe and efficient curbside pick-up, while others have focused on improving their digital ordering experience with personalization and added reward points.
2. Definition: In this phase, the domain expert, data expert, and architecture team work together to define core domains and their boundaries using an API-first strategy, so each service has its own data, with a clear definition of the methods and operations which implement the business logic independently on that data.
3. Implementation: In the phase, a POD team takes the bounded context and implements the business capabilities through cohesive and scalable services that are independently developed and automated. This strategy not only ensures the team remains focused on solving the most important problems but also helps to deliver the application faster and lower iteration cycles.

In an environment of unprecedented uncertainty, IT needs to be more aligned to the business than ever. When done correctly, domain-driven design ensures that restaurants can adapt to change as quickly as possible.

Capgemini works with leading quick-service restaurants across the nation to embrace digital transformation and adapt to the current environment. We leverage accelerators like Digital Cloud Platform, our library of pre-built software components, to speed development by up to 50 percent and draw on a proven methodology for helping IT organizations embrace POD models for unprecedented agility. To learn more, reach out or visit our web page.

Authors:

Anand Gupta

Rahul Khandelwal