How to
Effectively
Implement

Mobile in Restaurants

Six Steps for a Good Outcome

To get the maximum return on mobile technology investments, it's critical to get it right. You want to be sure employees are going to accept and use the technology. To realize the expected productivity improvements, your solution must contribute to better customer experiences. Here are the steps required for a good outcome:

Step 1: Understand

The first step is knowing exactly where you want to go. Your business needs and desired outcomes should be clearly defined. Define the use cases you want to address. You should have a roadmap of what the future looks like. It's likely you won't implement everything at once, and your roadmap allows you to prioritize use cases to implement, its timing, and how you'll access the ROI of each. You should also look at any software applications and devices you're currently using. Will new systems need to integrate with the old?

Put yourself in the shoes of your end users (both employees and customers) to understand their needs, pain points, and what a great experience looks like. It's a classic mistake to go out and buy a solution that ends up being too hard to use, and you end up with nobody adopting it.

Honestly evaluate if you have the internal resources to design an effective solution. Many IT teams understand support but don't have the expertise to design. You need a resource with knowledge of what's possible and how to get there.

Do a health check of your existing infrastructure. Do you have the necessary connectivity? Can you leverage 5G? What do your internal networks look like? Do you have to integrate legacy technology, or will you rip and replace? What will that transition look like?

Your solutions have to run your workflows AND integrate with outside platforms like applications for online ordering and taking payments. How is that going to work? Which applications do you intend to integrate with?

What is the adoption journey going to look like? Will every team transition overnight, or do use cases need to be staggered? What will be the criteria for go or no go?

What's your endpoint management plan? How are you going to deploy, secure, and update?

You need to plan the financial model as well – who is paying/responsible? Are they going to be financed or leased or owned?

Yes, it's a lot to think about, but all of the above must be done—the better and more comprehensive your plan, the better your outcome.

Dipesh Hinduja

Director, Mobile Solutions Architect

Create a mobility blueprint that includes everything required for your solution, from procurement to end-user support. It should include items such as:

Device choice: Is equipment powerful enough? What form factors are required? Tablets? Smartphones? Will they deliver good end-user experiences, and can you use them across multiple workflows? Who will be using them and where? Multi-use device strategies save money because you need less equipment, and maintenance is simpler. Consider accessories for charging and rugged cases. Consider the cost and lifecycle of the devices. Cheaper isn't necessarily cheaper if devices break often and need more support.
Deployment strategy: Your mobility blueprint should also include your rollout plan. How will users train? Should there be a pilot project? What do you need to know from that project to ensure everything works as intended before you roll out more broadly?
Device lifecycle management: Plan how you will efficiently obtain devices, get them set up, distributed, always know where they are, and repair or replace them if they fail.
Endpoint management plan: A unified endpoint management solution can secure and maintain every device in your restaurant from PCs to mobile devices and more. You should choose a provider in your planning stage.
Technical support plan: What will you do when a device fails. Will you have a help desk? What will be the process for getting devices repaired?

Dipesh Hinduja

Director, Mobile Solutions Architect

How are you going to procure devices, kit and configure them, get them where they need to go, and then launch them into your workflows? Do you have the necessary resources? Do you have the space?

How will you get devices to restaurants? Will they need a portal to order through where each restaurant is responsible or is corporate going to handle it all?

Equipment should arrive out-of-the-box ready for end users because that ensures good experiences and high adoption rates. If devices aren't configured properly, that can lead to problems and downtime starting on day one.

Dipesh Hinduja

Director, Mobile Solutions Architect

Launching mobile technology solutions is not fire and forget. Who is going to be responsible for the ongoing maintenance and repair of devices?

Logistics is key to the ongoing success of a program. Devices will break. End users will need support when a device isn't working right. Security, patches, and OS updates require certified experts and you need to plan your logistics management.

Because your devices will be an important part of your AUV, productivity, and cost controls, you will need to ensure that you have easy access to a spare pool of devices and a cost effective way to repair broken devices. If you have to replace a broken device with a new one every time because it's not protected, your ROI will get eroded quickly.

A great deal of support can be automated through your endpoint management platform. It can push updates and do other maintenance that keeps devices running smoothly. Still, there are going to be issues, and you need reliable technical support to solve them and minimize downtime. That help should be available 24/7 and feature the channels of support that users need, like voice, text, and email.

When you are adding mobile use cases to a traditional technical support center, you have to carefully consider their expertise, certifications, and how you will upskill agents on the mobile use cases. You should be gathering data on support tickets because that helps you spot common problems that could be proactively managed better and knowledge articles should be updated frequently.

Alex Kalish

Chief Strategy and Solutions Officer