We’ve seen a lot of restaurants stepping into the mobile payments arena, with eateries and coffee shops from Starbucks to Wienerschnitzel getting in on the action.
Users are still a bit hesitant to turn to that kind of payment system, however, and it’s prompting restaurants to take a closer look at what they can offer customers to get customers turning to the mobile payment system to make payments instead of others.
It turns out, according to Karen Webster at Pymnts.com, that customers are looking for one big thing when it comes to mobile payments, and that’s certainty.
The payment system needs to work, reliably, every time, and it doesn’t matter which merchant class is involved.
This makes sense; Penny Arcade actually touched on a similar theme in its strip “Magnets”, in which it feels shockingly cool to pay for things with your phone, but when it doesn’t work, it feels like you’re some Arthurian-age wizard throwback trying desperately to survive in the modern era.
Restaurants, meanwhile, are discovering that users are interested in getting in and getting out in short order, and when they’re ready to check out, they’re ready to check out.
Fast and efficient, frictionless…these are key words when it comes to the restaurant customer experience. For a third of recently-surveyed restaurants, however, they believe that they’re just not up to the task technologically.
Franchises were quick to adopt newer technologies—we just saw Wendy’s plan order kiosks—but independent restaurants were slower, usually owing to a lack of resources.
Things like mobile ordering systems and mobile payment systems all built into apps were either on the drawing board or just pipe dreams, and that’s starting an unexpected dichotomy.
It’s unusual to think that the chain burger joint is higher-tech than a full-service mom-and-pop operation, but that’s what we’re looking at. There’s a great opportunity afoot for restaurants, but not everyone can take appropriate advantage of that due to technological or resource restraints.
Some are even limited based on thematic options: while advance order for pickup is great for a restaurant that handles take-out options—of any size—it’s not so great for a sit-down place.
This technological gap is likely to expand as time goes on, and though it doesn’t mean the doom of independent restaurants, it may mean doom for certain breeds and certain formats.