Recently, Street Fight published a piece on “How Forward-Thinking Brands Are Leveraging Automation” and in it they described how Dickey’s BBQ Franchise has introduced custom commands with Amazon’s Alexa in order to enable franchise owner-operators to periodically find out about real-time sales figures throughout the day. Those sales figures come from a data warehouse platform that Dickey’s BBQ Franchise business custom-developed to support their franchisees.
I know that one aspect of restaurant management is knowing if or when to “cut” kitchen and dining room support staff, depending on a restaurant’s traffic. If lunch or dinner appears to be slow for business, it is important to send waitpeople, busboys, and cooks home in order to reduce unnecessary costs. It sounds to me like this real-time feedback on sales figures is likely intended for this very purpose, since most restaurant owner-operators should know pretty closely exactly how much their daily operations cost, as well as exactly how much money they need to make per hour in order to at least break even, and maybe to even make a good profit.
Dickey’s BBQ Franchise has also created their own customer-reporting tools to help the corporate offices and local franchisees to gage customer satisfaction, and to quickly get necessary information to determine if some sort of intervention needs to happen with particular staff members.
Dickey’s Barbecue chefs are also leaning on voice technology in the kitchen, such as tracking barbecued ribs’ cooking times in the kitchen, and more.
At Fast Casual Executive Summit in late 2018, Dickey’s BBQ Pit Franchise CEO, Laura Rea Dickey stated:
“It’s about making it simple, bite-size pieces, to drive user adoption inside the franchise,” said CEO Laura Rea Dickey, who added that a critical aspect to making AI valuable is having a deep swell of data flowing into the organization.”
It’s clear that providing access to key information at opportune times is driving goal for the adoption of voice search technology as well as big data analysis and AI-like systems.
It’s certain we’ll be seeing more integrations like this in upcoming years.