QRMenu – The future of FnB
Contactless technology has altered the hospitality daily operations landscape completely, while has become the main reason behind the resurgence of QR code technology during the epidemic. According to Bit.ly – a link management service, QR code downloads have soared 750% over the last 18 months. It has been contributing a great share in minimizing the inevitable ordering workload for the hospitality sector. Digitalize your restaurant, spa, and room services’ menus with a scannable QR code in just a few easy steps. Thanks to the new update of the POS – Food And Beverage system in the cloud-based hospitality management solutions – CiHMS: the QRMenu would allow you to turn the fancy above into reality. How does it work and how to get this technology implemented at your business today? We’ll get you all covered here in this blog.
QRMenu – a great updated feature of the POS – Food and Beverage system in the ultimate hospitality management solution – CiHMS.
What is QRMenu?
As its name might have given it all away, the QRMenu practically is a digital menu that you can access via a scannable QR code with your mobile phone. If you have not familiar with QR code or Quick Response code, it is the square matrix barcode, invented almost two decades now by a Japanese automobile company.
Starting to come back around hotels and restaurants ever since the COVID-19 pandemic crisis hit, the scannable QR code helps to prevent the risk of spreading infection and reassure customers’ hesitancy and doubts in the physical dine-in experience. The QR code could be printed right off the printers as you wish, then stuck on tables, front desk, or just anywhere hoteliers see fit. Customers can easily get directed to the hotels’ menu, make orders, pay, and submit feedback – a massive step-up from your standard paper menu version.
The bright sides of QRMenu
Plenty of benefits the QRMenu brings into the pictures that are hard to miss out on:
- Quick modification and high versatility: By replacing with a digital menu, restaurants can add/remove a dish on the menu without re-printing the menu all over again. The perk of having a digital menu means you can do everything digitally: changing the price tag during the day, locking in a promotional price for a certain period, or having a varied menu for breakfast, lunch, dinner is also possible.
- Unique and creative marketing tool: Allows hoteliers to be creative with their menu design layout and force them to test out which layout brings their best conversion rate. This sounds outrageous but is not. Play out different types of design on your menus, move sections up and down and see what best serves your business. Be bold with promotional campaigns and discounts on your menu with flashing titles, colors, and fonts.
- Sustainable hotel technology: Yes, indeed! The QRMenu is, in fact, contactless technology and contributes its big share in promoting the hotels to stay in check with the sustainable hotel technology. Guests go through a complete contactless experience using QRMenu: from scanning the QR code to receiving their orders.
QRMenu is a form of hospitality contactless technology, that helps stop the spread of infection transmission for guests and employees.
- Being actively eco-friendly and cutting expenses: QRMenu eliminates the paper menu off your hotels’ system entirely. No more printing or re-printing a menu seasonally or per promotional campaign. Imagine how much paper and money a digital menu can save a hotel throughout the year.
- Cutting down the ordering wait-time: Customers can take their time to decide what to order while waiting in line before the event gets seated, especially for a big group of customers. Hoteliers can enable guests to make orders upon access, streamline your hotels and restaurants’ operation from table to the kitchen, accelerate the speed of service, enhance guests’ experience and maximize employees’ performance, cutting out any recessive workflow.
- Accumulative big data: Receiving an overwhelmed source of data daily as a reminder for hoteliers have to start taking advantage of them. Keep your data analyzed and “upgrade” your menu accordingly to meet your customers’ expectations. Just as Bo Peabody, co-founder and executive chairman of Seated, had shared: “If you run a restaurant that doesn’t take reservations, you don’t know who your guest is until they pay. What the QR code might allow you to do is learn who that guest is right when they’re sitting down.” The bottom line is QR code helps you to grasp your customers’ insights without the need to spend thousands of dollars on a market research project.
- A solution to hospitality labor shortage: QRMenu lets hotels and restaurants operate at a much faster pace with fewer employees – Toast CEO Chris Comparato also agreed. No more taking-order tasks; leave these time-consuming tasks to your customers.
How to set up the QRMenu?
First thing first, you have to set up your hotels/restaurants’ menu beforehand. This part can be both fun and tricky. A Digital menu grants you the power to be creative while staying informative. Going with the classic design or bold typography, selective food dishes photography, or a full-on photographic menu featuring every dish there are on the menu? Should the hotel have different menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Or should they only have an All-day menu? They are all up to you but remember the first impression matters. Test the water and see which one works best for your business. Embrace the beauty of a digital menu.
QRMenu is an upgraded feature recently in CiHMS – the POS – Food And Beverage system, enabling hotels and restaurants to actively generate a unique QR code for each table or room separately at the properties, giving their guests instant access to hotels/restaurants’ menu, from which they can easily make orders at their own pace.
To generate a QR code, hoteliers have to specify which table/room this QR code is for, in the respective fields, including its floor number, the area, and the table’s current status (active/inactive). Upon completion, a QR code can be printed out and stuck on the location where it was created. It is literally all it takes.
The flexibility of QRMenu is impressive. You can configure your guests’ access solely to one specific menu, or different menus depending on the time of the day with just only one QR code or create different QR codes for each menu (breakfast/ brunch/ lunch/ dinner), and allow your guests to fill in their table number themselves.
QRMenu for room service works on the same principles. However, to reduce the excessive work on printing a different QR code for each room, big chain hotels would uniform the same QR code throughout and have their guests declare their room number before proceeding onto the ordering section.
The downside of QRMenu
Poor connection services
Understanding the fundamentals of how QRMenu operates, you might have come to realize that this functionality won’t work without a stable Internet connection. If you are committed to getting this QRMenu installed, please be mindful of your properties’ network. Opt for better Internet infrastructure, which shall be beneficial in the long run, an investment you certainly wish to invest in sooner.
Having a stable internet connection in place brings long-term benefits to hotels.
The power of habits
The other cons QRMenu might face is the customers’ reluctance to change. Young consumers or millennials are willing to accept and adapt to new technology innovations. Generation Y has been slowly redefining the hospitality industry, despite the older generations – the baby boomers are skeptical toward recent trends and resist taking the acceptance.
“People have different levels of digital comfort. Some people will prefer and enjoy the QR code and using the phone, and others will rather have the traditional menu.”
– CEO of Dine Brands, John Peyton.
QR code has regained its popularity ‘til recently after being snoozed for almost a decade. The new normal has ushered the hospitality industry to proactively implement sustainable hospitality technology to step out from traditional operations to explore and discover the possibilities to bring customers back in. Apart from QRMenu, there is plenty of other sustainable hospitality technology for hotels to look at. This is nowhere near the perfect solution for all businesses, though it’s pretty close.
The contactless era has already arrived, don’t stay behind! Train your staff well, encourage your customers to engage, and recognize what they have been missing out on all along. Interested in QRMenu and would love to see a demo? Contact the CiHMS team for a detailed consultancy on the product.
