Order Up - The Restaurant, the Omni Channel, and SD-WAN.
When I was a teenager my favorite restaurant was a Mongolian BBQ place in Orange County. The reason being was it had great food and you got a lot of it for a low price, the perfect place for a teenage football player. In my thirties, I really enjoyed the Mediterranean place down the street from my apartment in Long Beach. It was within walking distance, the food was delicious and the location in Belmont Shore was great for people watching. But, now I am older, and I have children, so my favorite restaurants today are usually ones that offer good food and convenience. Simply put I am addicted to the Omni-Channel.
If you are unaware of what the Omni-Channel is, then the quickest explanation is the use of smart phone apps so customers can order and pay for food with-out picking up a phone or entering the establishment. When they arrive, their tasty meal is waiting for them and they can get back to their already hectic life. If you want to see it done right, download the Starbucks App to your smart phone, load a few bucks on it, and start feeding your insane addiction to coffee without having to speak to another human being and earn loyalty points while doing so. In a world were convenience no longer means low quality, the Omni-Channel is how fast casual restaurants keep customers coming back again and again.
For myself, a professional who has spent almost twenty years delivering IT solutions for business, it occurs to me that the restaurant is no longer the small consumer it used to be. For the Omni-Channel to be successful, a restaurant group has to take their connectivity serious. Not only that, the old phone system and Point of Sale server that used to sit in the manager’s office, are moving to the cloud where restaurants can invest little in upfront cost and gain the power needed to compile customer data and learn customer trends. The day has arrived where a restaurant can no longer count on the local cable company or DSL service to handle their connectivity needs. The internet is way too important. The day has arrived when the restaurant has to count on enterprise class internet.
Or maybe they don’t. In fact, maybe enterprise solutions with symmetrical speeds, MPLS, SLAs and dedicated access is a liability and not the solution. First off, for the most part, enterprise carrier solutions are expensive. Secondly, when it comes to the user experience, the Omni-Channel only works if it works. If your carrier suffers a network outage or a last mile failure, then the experience is spoiled and often it only takes one bad experience for a customer to be turned off. Finally, in a business with razor thin margins can you afford to pay for bandwidth you don’t need. Since traditional internet solutions provide no insights or intelligence how do you determine your bandwidth spend (Let me guess. The sales guy told you right. I guess if the onion guy tells you to buy an extra pound of onions every week you’ll do that to, just kidding.)
At the end of the day, traditional internet solutions are the problem and even the best carriers cannot provide you with a reasonable priced solution that guarantees uptime. I have worked in the industry for a long time and, trust me, every carrier has issues. There are network outages, or the last mile goes down, or there is latency due to some massive file download. The list goes on and on. In all my years working with companies on their internet, I have rarely spoken to a person who says their internet carrier is awesome. Usually there are two categories: those that hate their provider and those who say their provider is great, because when they were down for four hours they got right on the problem and cleared it. Then, of course I have to ask, how much business did you lose while you were down for four hours?
I get it. The desire here is to say “This doesn’t apply to my business model” or “My IT staff has that handled and I don’t need to worry.” I mean you don’t go into the restaurant business to talk about bandwidth. You go into the restaurant business to make delicious food and create an experience. But, it is important to understand your consumers are changing, their desires are changing, and the restaurant’s that will capture their loyalty are ones that properly use technology to do so. In order to achieve this, the internet service is no longer an after-thought or simply something to check off. Your network has become serious.
So what is the solution? If you cannot rely on carriers to put forth a cost effective solution, what do you do? You need a solution that can do several things. First off, wouldn’t it be great to prioritize your data so you can make sure the important stuff goes first (you know the things that help you turn one time customers into loyal fans and the cat videos take a back seat). Then what if you could leverage multiple low-price carrier options and then have intelligence in place that will choose the best path available for the data packet at any given time? I am not talking about paying for a back-up service that you never use as “insurance.” No, I am talking about using both services at the same time so they make one super service that never goes down. Finally, you need real time reporting on your circuits.
Yes, it would be great and yes you can get all that by utilizing SD-WAN. SD-WAN is a new technology that allows companies to add intelligence to their internet. In short it is the perfect solution for restaurants that rely on cloud-based POS, VOIP, Office 365 and other internet based applications to run their operation. SD-WAN technology optimizes business Internet connectivity to ensure high quality business application performance, regardless of how individual internet connections are performing. By utilizing SD-WAN your restaurant will have;
· Intelligent load-balancing across multiple connections;
· Bi-directional quality of service prioritization over coax, DSL, wireless (basically any internet circuit.);
· Seamless failover of traffic between circuits without dropping sessions;
· Real-time app site metrics on packet loss, latency, jitter, throughput and usage.
To put it simply, SD-WAN adds intelligence to your network and gives you control. Gone are the days of simply throwing bandwidth at an issue, increasing your monthly spend, putting your eggs all in one basket, and then hoping for the best. By utilizing SD-WAN, we can design a network that addresses your needs and keeps cost inline.
