Quick-service businesses need low-cost, long-lasting solutions so their businesses are future-proofed to meet all user expectations. AI-driven WiFi monitoring is a key solution to achieving these business goals.
Common Challenges for Quick-Service
These common challenges, or pain points, are likely familiar with everyone who works at or owns a quick-service location. Let’s first look at them, and then get into the details of how AI-driven WiFi monitoring makes a difference.
Kiosks and POS devices
More and more quick-service businesses are adopting the use of kiosks and their built-in POS devices. Kiosks offer more streamlined service to customers—making it less likely for them to wait in line to place their order—and free up employees to focus on delivering food and maintaining the restaurant environment. They can improve the user experience by putting customers in the driver’s seat; when customers get to select options and choices themselves, and make any substitutions they desire, there is little chance of the fine print being missed and an order being taken that doesn’t perfectly meet user expectations.
The challenge is the operation of these kiosks. By nature, most of them are WiFi-enabled so they can be installed anywhere in a restaurant. However, if there’s a WiFi issue—whether long-lasting or intermittent—kiosks can be entirely offline, or glitch in a way that sours customer experience.
Sensors (IoT Devices)
The quick-service vertical is increasingly adopting new sensor technologies. These include:
- Devices to track inventory and support on-demand delivery
- Sensors that monitor temperatures in freezers and fridges
- Customer location tracking such as tableside beacons for order delivery
- Devices for monitoring employee schedules and time logging
- Digital menus that can be changed as items sell out or as seasonal items become available
- Energy management for HVAC equipment
- Monitoring devices for kitchen equipment
Some of these sensors only need to work when a restaurant is open, others must work 24/7. The more devices are adopted, the more complex WiFi networks become, and the higher the demand placed on them. If a network isn’t constantly monitored to be sure it is ready to meet this demand, fast-casual businesses can see unreliable performance from all sensors, which often leads to a loss of business continuity and revenue.
Guest Services
If customers choose to eat at a fast-casual restaurant, they expect connectivity. Whether they are there for a business meeting, study group, a casual lunch, or eating alone, they are likely to judge a restaurant on whether it offers reliable WiFi.
Is a network ready to support a dozen laptops, thirty mobile phones, as many smartwatches, and kiosks, POS devices, and the sensors needed by the restaurant to operate? If not, where are issues going to be felt? Will customers lose service, or employees? While it’s more serious for a restaurant’s devices to go offline, neither scenario is good for a business’s reputation.
How AI-Driven WiFi Monitoring Improves Quick-Service Restaurants and Enhances Customer Experiences
Restaurants need reliable WiFi networks built to meet business demands. Here is how AI-driven WiFi monitoring delivers WiFi assurance and helps address the above challenges.
24/7 automatic problem detection, notification, and mitigation: These solutions never sleep. They constantly analyze network activity and will identify problems in real time and alert IT professionals, whether staff are onsite. If a problem occurs overnight—perhaps a temperature-monitoring device has an intermittent issue and doesn’t work for a few minutes—IT knows about the problem, even though there was no human onsite to report it. This means the issue can be resolved before it happens again and causes potentially expensive losses.
Personal IT support: WiFi monitoring solutions let IT professionals know exactly what is happening on a network – both the good and the bad. When problems occur, solutions can identify the root cause and notify IT. This means that onsite employees are not required to be network experts.
Remote troubleshooting: With AI-driven monitoring, IT teams can often resolve problems without needing to travel onsite, which means the network is returned to optimal performance in less time and travel costs are reduced.
How AI-Driven WiFi Automation Sets Businesses Up for Success with Current and Future Industry Technology
Thanks to the modern digitization of fast-casual businesses, quick-service restaurant networks are only going to grow more complex. There are more and more IoT sensors entering the market, AR/VR training for staff, and devices and apps that deliver hyper personalization for customers.
This means that the potential for revenue-impacting network issues to occur is only growing. IT already has a critical need for network visibility, automatic alerts, and fast troubleshooting so that issues are resolved before customers and employees are impacted. That critical need isn’t going away. The threat to operational efficiency is increasing.
AI-driven WiFi automation is a game-changer in three ways.
Future-proofing: With AI-driven WiFi automation, restaurants get the analytics and insights they need to prevent catastrophic and intermittent issues. These solutions save historical analytics and identify long-term trends in performance. These detailed insights deliver in-depth visibility into what networks need to continue meeting user demand. With this information, decision makers can be sure their network is personalized for their needs now and into the future.
Cost-efficient testing: When rolling out new technologies, companies can use WiFi automation solutions to track user experience and business productivity before, during, and after the change at a few select stores. With its detailed analytics, decision makers will be able to answer questions such as, what is the impact on business operations? Is this worth rolling out everywhere?
Vendor agnostic design: These solutions are not tied to a particular sensor or other technology. They are independent monitors and will continue analyzing all network activity no matter what new industry technologies are adopted. With vendor agnostic solutions, insights are continuously delivered, no matter what.
Future-Proofing Matters
Quick-serves that are efficient, welcoming, and adaptable have a greater chance of success. In today’s digital world, a key component to achieving that success is a reliable, optimal network. AI-driven WiFi automation solutions make it possible to have cost-efficient WiFi assurance without a network engineer onsite. They are a capability that all businesses should adopt.
Roger Sands is the CEO and cofounder of Wyebot.
