Contactless Dining: Everything You Need to Know
Contactless Dining: Everything You Need to Know
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of changes to the restaurant industry, but perhaps the most significant has been the rise of the contactless dining experience.
Restaurants – especially full-service ones – have always been intimate, social spaces where people come together to connect with others, including staff. In fact, this kind of personalized customer service is one of the hallmarks of the restaurant industry.
Contactless dining is unique in that it flips this idea of customer service on its head. Instead of service with a smile, contactless dining involves helping diners view your menu, order, and pay for their meal, all with very limited face-to-face interaction. In other words, it’s dining gone digital.
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What Is Contactless Dining?
Let’s start by addressing the most obvious question: what is contactless dining?
Just as the name suggests, contactless dining is a dine-in experience that involves no close contact with restaurant staff and minimal touching of shared surfaces. This means that guests can view the menu, place their order, and pay for their meal all on their own with the help of technology such as QR codes.
How Does Contactless Dining Work?
While the experience can differ slightly depending on the restaurant and the technology in place, this is generally how contactless dining works:
- The customer scans a custom QR code with the built-in camera of their mobile device. This immediately redirects the customer to the restaurant’s contactless menu.
- After browsing the digital menu, the customer selects the items they wish to order.
- Orders are processed through the restaurant POS and sent directly to the kitchen.
- After placing their order, the customer can complete a contactless payment with their mobile device.
How to Set Up a Contactless Dining Experience in Your Restaurant
Though it may sound complicated, contactless dining is relatively simple to set up in your restaurant – you just need to make sure you have the right restaurant technology in place.
Below, we’ve outlined how to set up a completely contactless dining experience in your restaurant, including the self-service technology you need to facilitate contactless ordering and contactless payments.
1. Set Up Your Integrated POS Solution
Without a doubt, the most important piece of technology in any contactless dining setup is your restaurant POS system. This is the piece of technology that connects your digital menu to your kitchen.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some restaurant POS providers have introduced software or third-party integrations that facilitate digital ordering. This software ensures that when a customer places an order from your digital menu on their phone, the order is automatically recorded in the POS system and immediately sent to the kitchen so the back of house team can begin preparing it. Without this kind of software in place, customers may be able to view your menu on their phone, but they won’t actually be able to place those orders digitally.
2. Create an Online Menu for Contactless Dining
Once you have the right software in place, the next step is to set up the contactless menu for your customers to browse and order from. Remember, printed menus are one of the highest touch surfaces in any restaurant, which means having a digital menu is an essential part of the contactless dining experience. Your online restaurant menu also sets the stage for the next step in the dining process: contactless ordering.
With most contactless dining solutions, you can edit your menu to complement the digital dining experience. And while it may be tempting to leave your regular menu as is, keep in mind that you may need to make some adjustments to compensate for the fact that your staff will have less contact with customers.
3. Create Custom QR Codes for Your Menu
Once you’ve set up your contactless menu, the next step is to make it quick and easy for customers to actually access that menu.
A QR code menu is essentially a digital version of your menu that diners can access by scanning a custom code with their mobile phones – just think of it as a barcode for your menu. After a customer scans the QR code, your restaurant’s menu will automatically pop up, allowing customers to access your menu without typing in a long URL. And customers don’t even need to download a separate app to scan your code because most modern smartphones come with a QR code reader built right into the phone’s camera.
To create a custom QR code for your menu, you can use a free tool like IQMenu. To use the tool, all you need to do is enter the URL of your restaurant’s online menu and your venue’s logo image (a .jpg or .png file). The tool will then automatically generate a custom QR code that you can print and display on tables for customers to scan.
4. Set Up Contactless Payment Processing
The final piece of technology involved in the contactless dining experience is contactless payment processing.
In your restaurant, you might already have contactless payment terminals that let customers process tap and mobile payments without the need to touch the credit card reader. However, these kinds of contactless payments still require staff to bring terminals directly to the customers’ table.
