Barista Magazine

APR-MAY 2017

Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005

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100 barista magazine out in roughly 400 restaurants. In addition to the reduced time spent by cus- tomers waiting in line, stores using the kiosks reported year-over-year sales increases of as much as 6 percent. Other brands, however, have deployed a more measured approach, including McDonald's and Wendy's, both of which have piloted kiosks in some of their locations but have not expanded to all or even most of them. Tablet-based kiosks are new enough that not all the kinks are worked out yet: They're not all equipped to accept chip-enabled credit cards, and a columnist for www.foodrevolt.com described their visit to Panera as positive overall, but "one of the fi ve displays lost its strength and was hanging down like a broken droid bot from Star Wars . Not a good overall look and expresses the downside to technology in heavy use by the public." Popular mobile point-of-sale systems such as Revel and Elo have begun to roll out kiosk "modes" that make the technology available and affordable to smaller businesses, but they've been slow to make inroads with specialty-coffee retailers. Ordering from your phone Starbucks integrated phone ordering with their popular payment app, but execution has been evolutionary. While an order placed through the app is ultimately fi red to a modifi ed thermal printer to alert the team of the incoming order, there remains just enough room in the process for humans involved to make judgment calls, including "we wanted to make sure that espresso was ready so it's been sitting there for nine minutes." Chicago's Eastman Egg is among the most sophisticated of the order apps. While the interface is similar to that of what ChowNow offers its restaurant customers (a white-labeled app that bears the identity of the restaurant, but the code is nearly the same from business to business, with the exception of the menu items and prices), Eastman Egg's app ultimately integrates with their point-of-sale system, Toast POS, so that once the restaurant staff is alerted of the order, it's already in the POS. Better still, Eastman Egg employs iBeacon technology to detect when the customer is within a certain distance of the restaurant, and the order fi res to the associated kitchen printer. Keeping the human touch While established restaurant pros like John Meyer create environments that still value high- touch, customer-centric interactions, café and restaurant proprietors who've come of age more recently may start to put most of their chips on technology to speed the line during a rush, and streamline other aspects of the transaction, such as payment. Nonetheless, Kyle Glanville of Los Angeles' G&B; Coffee and Go Get Em Tiger has fi gured out a way to use technology to bring convenience to his customers without losing the human interaction that is so central to their service model. "I recall sitting out front of our Larchmont café on a busy Sunday and seeing our weekday regulars walk by muttering, 'I can't even get in there on Sundays,' and thinking that we had to bring our service to our customers a little more. This gave birth to the concept of allowing folks to text us our order. Texting is a platform everybody uses, so it doesn't require a new app. The biggest advantage for us, however, is that it allows for a real, service-focused human being to respond on the other side. Much hacking, tweaking, and assistance from the folks at Science later, we had created a new role in our company where a real barista was awaiting our customer's texts on the other side. "It was so essential that our use of tech- nology stay rooted in our goal to enhance the human element. Are there automated options? Sure. But no robot will ever replace the authen- tic experience delivered by an actual friendly, knowledgeable human being." As long as G&B; and other industry leaders continue to focus on achieving a balance, where technology brings effi ciency but humans drive the interaction, perhaps it's unlikely that ventures like Robot Coffee will supplant café culture completely.

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