The world of artificial intelligence is growing at a rapid rate, with smart, data-driven technologies helping to replace many manual, time-consuming processes.
While AI might seem like a minefield, the chances are you’re already using it in some capacity, without even realising it, and artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the restaurant industry in a positive way. Here’s how:
How to reduce food waste using artificial intelligence
Food waste is a major issue within the restaurant industry, and one that all restaurants should be considering when it comes to the day-to-day running of their business. Artificial intelligence can empower your restaurant to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste.
With Lightspeed Advanced Insights, you can get a detailed breakdown of your menu performance, showing you your best dishes, and least popular dishes. With this data, you can focus on the dishes that sell well, and avoid wasting ingredients on dishes that you know don’t sell as well. As well as helping to reduce food waste, this will also save your restaurant money.
Improve employee satisfaction with artificial intelligence
Your employee’s happiness is integral to running a successful restaurant. Unhappy staff lead to higher turnover, which in turn costs you money. Disgruntled employees can also damage the reputation of your restaurant. Using artificial intelligence in the form of scheduling tools can help improve your employee’s satisfaction.
Lightspeed Advanced Insights shows you when your restaurant is busiest, so you can schedule the right amount of staff accordingly, and not waste money on scheduling staff when your restaurant is quiet.
Workforce is an employee scheduling tool that has a powerful machine learning algorithm that builds rotas based on the weather, footfall, events, and location-specific trends.
This use of AI in restaurants, in turn, improves staff satisfaction, as it leads to less last-minute cancelled shifts, and ensures your employees will have plenty of work when they are in, leading to improved productivity.
The role of AI in customer service
Customer service is a sector that embraces artificial intelligence through the form of chatbots. The chances are you’ve spoken to a chatbot on a website when you have a question and don’t want to go through email or phone.
A chatbot acts as a virtual assistant and interacts with website visitors like a real human, responding with text or voice answers to questions.
Your restaurant website can utilise chatbots to reduce the amount of time you spend manually answering queries and improve customer satisfaction.
As well as answering customer queries, examples of how your restaurant can use a chatbot includes letting customers make reservations, check in on the progress of takeaway orders, or suggest menu items they might like to eat.
Another benefit of integrating your restaurant’s website with a chatbot is that you can offer customer service 24/7, without asking employees to work overtime. As well as improving life for your employees, this always-on customer service approach reduces the amount of time a customer is left waiting, improving the overall experience for them, too.
