Privately Owned Restaurants, Large Chains, technological advancements
For most organizations operating in direct service line industries, they are faced with sustaining the excellent delivery of services while containing the mushrooming of variable costs attributed to everyday operations. Ordinarily, exceptional customer service is a critical component for the success of the food service industry since the absence of customer satisfaction plunges the operators to abject disaster. In practice, creating intimate relationships with the clientele has been the fundamental principle under which most restaurants have grounded their operations to foster customer loyalty and eliminate defection to other operators.
However, in the advent of technological advancements and globalization spreading across various sectors, integrating technology has rapidly changed the dining experience. Get off the call, use of consolidated call centers, get out of the client site, and move on to the next appointment are features of restaurant technology in large chains reducing time and cost of sustaining direct personal contact with customers (Yarnold, 2012). Although rapid application of technology plays a decisive role in changing the dining experience in large restaurants, the existence of home- grown restaurants are ever upbeat given the ambience and personal services they provide.
[...] Specialty of independent restaurants provides an avenue which translates into more profitability in unit time contrasted to the large chains operating large sized items. Thirdly, operating large chains demand sustaining large menus demanding huge inventory items on the shelf equivalent to the size of the entity. Maintaining few selected items in the menu enables the independent restaurants to survive the competitive environment by reducing the incidence of loss arising from theft and incorrect storage leading to spoilage. BUSINESS Specialty on few items in the menu implies few items in the inventory, thus less waste implying more profits for the restaurant. [...]
[...] Restaurateurs overall fear emerges from uncertainty about what lies in the future of regaining declining levels of repeat customers. For that reason, large chains are countering the trend by assuming proactive stances in embracing technological advances to improve their service quality and build customer loyalty. Typically, hotels and restaurants are continually competing for employees, locations, and more recent information about customers, prompting application of technology to extract such information in time and sustain their growth despite troubled economic times (Koutroumanis, 2011). [...]
[...] Nevertheless, independent restaurants continue to thrive under distinct factors enabling their presence to stand out despite the presence of national chains. Firstly, implementing the technology to build a unique atmosphere barely strikes the influencing reason why customers visit the chains rather than focus on the customary motive of weathering competition. While the large chains believe their food products and services are unique and better than of rivals by BUSINESS implementing the technology, they live under the intuition of other operators making similar 8 claims. [...]
[...] Restaurants survive through personalized-based marketing that build memories amongst consumers coupled with the quick services and specialties. For instance, public relation campaigns offer patrons of independent restaurants a sense of connection and inculcate longterm relationships with the immediate society as opposed to a sales pitch attributed to the large BUSINESS chains (Ferasat, 2009). Independent restaurants are in a position of understanding the demographic trend and psychographic profile to capitalize on increasing customer satisfaction and focus on what keeps the consumers re-visiting The human contact in the service industry generates meaningful reason for a revisit and a dining experience that translate into loyalty and, thus, the survival of the independent restaurants. [...]
[...] Lastly, a restaurant menu exists as the predominant source of information to visiting customers. In view of that, the presentation of the menu in an appealing approach induces sales and customer loyalty, prompting usage of the iPad as a menu-displaying device to replace the traditional-paper based menu which has a bigger impact towards their satisfaction on the dining experience (Hsu & Wu, 2013). The contemporary use of iPad ordering eliminate walkaways common when customers are disconnected from prompt services by servers. [...]
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