I admit, I’m sometimes guilty of overthinking the research questions I want to ask and all possible outcomes and explanations for the answers. While I like to think this makes me great at research and risk management, the quest for the perfect insight or decision can cause one to get bogged down in details and lose site of the of the bigger picture. That’s especially true when wanting to solve for all the challenges being thrown at restaurant operators all at once.
For Technomic’s forthcoming Consumer and Operator Outlook study, I decided to get back to basics and ask consumers a fundamental question that every operator should be thinking about: “Why do you order from restaurants rather than cook at home?”
Long story short: people are exhausted.
A lack of time and energy bests the social aspect of restaurant dining by 10+-points. This is not entirely surprising given the modern demands placed upon people’s time, as well as pandemic and other stressors which can sap energy, eat at one’s time and impact decision-making.
What does this mean for restaurants? While the dining experience and food certainly play a significant role in drawing customers back for repeat business, it’s important for operators to understand, position around and respond to the physical and mental states fundamentally driving consumers to restaurants in the first place–time and energy, or lack thereof.
First, ordering must be easy. Whether it’s through an app, menu board or paper menu, design and organize your menu so that it requires minimal thinking and eases decision making, while also promoting your high margin offerings. While much has been already been written about the QR code, I’m here to repeat that unless you know from your customers that it makes the whole dining experience (from ordering to paying) quicker and easier, don’t.
Ensure that your staff understands the menu and is trained to make recommendations on menu items, add-ons and sides, the number of items to order (particularly for shared plates) and beverage pairings. This will help customers with decision fatigue especially after a long day, as well as boost check averages.
Finally, assume that if consumers don’t have the time to cook at home, then they don’t have a long time to spend at restaurants, or rather, waiting for their food and beverages at restaurants (or for delivery). Even at full-service restaurants, where guests do not expect to feel rushed, they still expect service to be attentive, food and drinks to be timely and payment to be easy. Transparency can go a long way with easing customer stress around wait times through digital (order-ahead options and real-time waiting times) and analog (server or host updates) methods.
With all of the challenges operators are facing, operators should step back occasionally to consider why consumers go to restaurants and why they should go to your restaurant and make sure those two things align. The devil’s in the details of course, and that’s where overthinking can be a virtue.
For more information on how to get into the details, please reach out to Technomic at info@technomic.com or technomic.com. Technomic is a sister company of Restaurant Business.