There are many reasons why the largest quick-service brands, from McDonald’s to Taco Bell, have gone all-in on self-service kiosks. To name a few: the kiosk model has been shown to raise average ticket sizes, to cut labor expenses, to increase customer satisfaction, and to yield nearly perfect order accuracy.
Many experts believe the movement toward kiosks is a big piece of where the industry is headed. It’s an area where a task—order taking, in this case—is automated, something more important than ever before as labor shortages have reached a fever pitch. And while the pandemic is often cited as the cause of labor shortages and an increasing reliance on automation, the truth is that the industry was headed this direction long before spring 2020.
“At GRUBBRR, our core belief is that the cashier is obsolete,” says Sam Zietz, CEO of GRUBBRR, a tech company specializing in self-service ordering solutions that seamlessly integrate with most any restaurant management solution. “It’s no different than an airport cashier—this was naturally going to happen. It took a while longer because the restaurant industry has always been lagging behind thanks to a reliance on cheap labor. Well, as that labor becomes more expensive, brands are realizing they need to find new solutions.”
But for brands smaller than the heaviest of hitters, rolling out kiosks may feel like an expense they cannot afford. That would be a mistake, Zietz says, as GRUBBRR partnered with Samsung to create a solution affordable for any quick-service restaurant. These self-ordering kiosks leverage Samsung’s hardware alongside GRUBBRR’s proprietary software, giving small and medium-sized brands an opportunity to compete with larger brands. The software easily integrates with POS systems, loyalty apps, and most any combination of those things within the digital ecosystem.
“Brands like McDonald’s spend $10,000 on every kiosk,” Zietz says. “And that doesn’t take into account how much they paid to develop and beta-test the software. What we did in partnering with Samsung, is that we democratized the cost of hardware. Instead of $10,000 per kiosk, we can bring a better system for a smaller brand at the retail price of $2,500.”
The kiosks, Zietz says, very quickly pay for themselves. Brands can count on ticket sizes to be 12 to 22 percent higher thanks to a multi-layered upselling feature on GRUBBRR’s software. The upselling feature uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to customize irresistible options to be added on to an order. For example, if a customer orders three tacos for $4.99, the kiosk would know which items pair most successfully with those tacos and might offer chips and queso for an extra $2.99—It’s a far cry from the days of a cashier blindly asking every customer if they want to supersize a meal, or “add fries to that.”
On top of that—and perhaps best of all for brands dealing with labor woes—restaurants which are accustomed to paying two or three cashiers can drop down to just one cashier, cutting labor costs in a dramatic fashion, or rerouting employees to focus on other tasks. This might be the biggest win for smaller brands: the ability to downsize staff and ensure profitability remains high in the face of the various headwinds facing the industry in 2022.
“The biggest thing we’ve seen is that small businesses just aren’t aware that this technology is affordable,” Zietz says. “It’s become our mission to say this is affordable, it’s accessible to you. You don’t have to be McDonald’s or Taco Bell—we can get you up and running in days.”
For more on implementing self-service kiosks, visit the GRUBBRR website.
