Which novelties will visitors find at Zucchetti’s booth at Igeho?
Christian Mattle:
We show innovations for different users in the HORECA industries – i.e. restaurants, self-service restaurants, quick service, canteens or public catering as well companies in the entertainment sector. We will equip these companies with a new hospitality app – the TCApp. At Igeho, we will also be showing Digital Signage for the first time. As a complete solution provider, we will be presenting our full 360-degree-solution, which ranges from table reservation, to the POS, up to sales and the ERP – everything the customer could wish for.
Can you explain the concept of the 360-degree-solution?
What sets us apart from other companies, is that we can actually offer a complete 360-degree-solution, every aspect of it produced within Zucchetti Group. By being part of Zucchetti Group, we have the advantage of being to provide a diversified, first-class, integrated product portfolio – suitable for a wide range of requirements and needs.
By belonging to Zucchetti Group you have the ability to present a 360-degree-solution?
On the one hand, we offer a 360-degree-solution and, on the other hand, we excel at offering best-of-breed – or rather “best-in-class” solutions. We are not only experts in the POS industry but we can also help optimizing the business of clients with an existing POS, for example by providing ERP solutions. BI, Self-Service kiosk, eCommerce and Workforce Management are just some of the Zucchetti products we have integrated. We offer our customers a range of the best solutions, which are seamlessly integrated, meaning they do not have to spend a lot of effort with numerous suppliers and vendors. Customers can rely on a single point of contact for all IT questions and requirements: Zucchetti.
How do you capture the customer journey with it?
We can accompany the entire Customer Journey from the very beginning and we’re present through various channels throughout, even before the guest leaves their house, in order to maximize loyalty. We serve every single touchpoint for the customer from our back office – be it the POS, the kiosk or digital signage and many others.
The caterer or restaurant owner chooses to sell an article, for example a Coke. This article is then displayed in every single vending channel and touchpoint – for the same price, promotion and most importantly: at the same time.
This means the caterer doesn’t have to worry about aligning the prices throughout different vending channels (i.e. the kiosk, POS, or TCApp). If you want to manage that efficiently, you need a partner. Everything else will just lead to various errors, and will require a lot of effort, if many different systems are not managed by one provider.
The most important thing in the customer journey is the customization and guest interaction. This ensures that the guest is really guided through the customer journey in a personalized way. With our solutions, we get to know the customer and his preferences and we can reach him at every touchpoint – through tailored push notifications or loyalty programs, which is extremely important nowadays. The app acts as a mediator through which we want to bring guests to our customer’s restaurant.
How does the app work?
The app is for our client’s customers. Meaning it is a caterer’s or restaurant owner’s app working in the Horeca industries and a connecting factor between restaurant owners and their guests. Guests can see promotions, put in orders, pay and use the loyalty program with the TCApp. By enabling push notifications, customer loyalty can be increased.
The more personalized it looks, the more we increase loyalty. This in turn promotes sales. We are very happy to have a very strong app that has become an integral part of the customer journey.
The caterer can put his own his logo, colours and branding on the app to adapt it to the CI?
It’s the caterer’s app – it’s for his customers. The goal is telling caterers: hey, we will get guests to your restaurant. Of course, the app is branded with the CI and logo of the caterer (/restaurant owner), as that is what he gives to his guests. The guest then has the app on their smartphone so they can receive promotions to their phone as well as pay with it, easily and quickly. For example, if the restaurant owner knows about the guest’s preferences (e.g. Cake and Coffee), they can send the guest a message via app during a promotion telling them: “Dear guest, today from 4-6p.m you will get a slice of cake for free to go with your cup of coffee.” This way, the restaurant owner is much closer to his customers and can react more quickly (in real-time).
So the app is an excellent opportunity to increase customer loyalty as well as having potential for cross- and upselling?
Correct. In the future, we will be enabling push notifications, which means that a guest can also send requests to their favorite restaurants through the app. If I, as a guest, know that I once had a lovely evening at the restaurant, where I ate fantastic roast beef and enjoyed live music, I can quickly send a request via app, asking when there will be another event like it. This allows for close, uninterrupted interaction via app.
Brilliant – and will visitors have the possibility to witness first-hand how the new app works?
Of course, customers can have a go at the app themselves.
You will also present the self-ordering kiosk on the stand. Why does the kiosk continue to be this popular among customers?
The Self-Ordering Kiosk is extremely trendy. Primarily famous within public catering and quick service restaurants. Why is he so popular? Because he provides guests with enough time to choose what he would like to buy.
There are actually many customers, who would prefer to decide and order at an intuitive kiosk, rather than just being squeezed through with many other people in a typical, hectic quick service or public catering environment. When many people queue up and then have to order, sometimes it happens that guests do not have enough time to really see and choose all they’d like to order – so they end up just ordering something, quickly going to the checkout, paying and leaving.
At the Self-Ordering Kiosk, guests have enough time to take a thorough look at what is available. It has been proven that customers order much more, when they are not under pressure or in a time-sensitive situation. Moreover, the kiosk has the big advantage of displaying promotions in a sophisticated way with nice imagery, for example offering additional items like a dessert.
At a kiosk, the exact thing takes place that does not in a typical quick service or public catering environment: upselling. Therefore, it is safe for us to say that the kiosk sells much more than any conventional POS.
Which innovations and solutions will you be showing besides the ones already mentioned?
We will present Dish Recognition, a term that is analogue to Face Recognition, the only difference being that our solution does not recognize faces, but food and drinks.
The Dish Recognition aims to speed up the checkout process in public catering. Up until now, the process consisted of a cashier manually checking every article on a guest’s tray and typing it into the POS.
Our Dish Recognition takes over this entire process and automates it: a built-in camera detects all items on the tray and automatically passes that information to the point-of-sale. Thus, the only thing the customer has left to do is pay – meaning the entire checkout process is simplified and accelerated.
So far, the conventional payment process is still a weak point: Customers have food on their tray, hot food, they have to stand in the queue, pay and, worst-case scenario, their food is already cold by the time they get to their table. By speeding up or automating this entire process, i.e. scanning items, billing, payment etc., there will be much more joy in public catering.
Many new solutions! Besides the exciting solutions, why should visitors stop by the Zucchetti booth?
You should most definitely come visit us at Igeho. We will be displaying the most innovative solutions and show visitors that we truly are able to provide useful tools, with which customers can increase turnover, work more efficiently, minimize costs and offer their customers more. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. We would like to introduce visitors to the trends of tomorrow.
Visit Zucchetti and their POS-Experts at IGEHO from 16. – 20. November 2019 in Basel. Find them in hall 1.1, stand B135.
