Q3) Find out the updated trends about restaurant operations

 Technology advancement has led restaurant operation to a higher level. Tasks like suggestive selling, attracting customers and ordering are very different than before.


Social media for restaurant

   Front of the house of a restaurant is important for the purpose of attracting customer. Traditionally it will depend by the hostess, greeter, or the layout of the restaurant, which are inside the restaurant. However, due to technology advancement and the popularity of smart phone, the front of the house has extended outside the restaurant and go online.

 Nowadays, many customers will search for restaurants and upload their experience in a restaurant online. Therefore, it is very important for any restaurant to know how to do advertisement and branding with the use of social media.

  There are some online search engine for restaurant like OpenRice. From the restaurant point of view, it can be a great channel of free advertisement to increase exposure. However, comment and rating online can be negative and stop customers from coming. Therefore, to manage their online image, some restaurant will actively leave positive rate and comment online with hidden identity. Also, some restaurant may try to make use of the fame and user base of online restaurant search engine by cooperating with them, providing extra discount or special offer to customers.

  Also, with the use of smartphone and smartphone app, it is easy and popular to upload our everyday life on social networking platform(for example Instagram), contributing to the trend of sharing restaurant information online. Some users of the social networking platform may then open an account and sharing their experience of specific categories of content like restaurant. These kind of users can generate a large amount of other users who are interested in the same topic, and affecting many customers' choice on choosing restaurant. Therefore, some famous users may be invited by different restaurants to try their food and drinks and leave comment on their page in order to have cheap but effective advertisement.

  Moreover, instead of passively letting others leave comment and rate for their restaurant, many restaurants will actively open and manage their own page on social networking site like Facebook. As famous social networking sites have huge amount of user base and grant their users high degree of freedom in managing their own page, it is a very good advertising channel for any restaurant to use. They can freely publish their restaurant's information and special offers online in order to attract customers.

Technology advancement for the front of the house

  Ordering processing and suggestive selling  the front of the house is different with the use of technology.
The ordering and payment process can now be combined and performed by customer themselves.
  With devices like this, customers are able to order, pay and leave comments to the restaurant, without having any contact to anybody. Customer do not need to ask the waiter to come and take order or payment, and the restaurants can cut down cost on manpower as their customers can help themselves.

  This kind of devices had already be widely used by many restaurants, or partly applied in the operating process. For example, Festival Walk McDonald has applied an electronic ordering and payment machine. Customers can even self-customize the food they need. Attractive interface of the device often help restaurant do suggestive selling too.

Conclusion
Through the study of updated trends about restaurant operation, we learnt the importance of a restaurant operation manager to keep up with advanced technology. This is because we can turn the operation practice more effective and efficient with the application of technology, just like the advertisement with social networking sites and application of technology on front of the house tasks. Those new technology are not to be learnt in the textbook.






Reference
http://www.openrice.com/zh/hongkong/directory/buffet.htm?con=navi
https://instagram.com/hkfoodsnap/
https://instagram.com/foodki.ako/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Daikiya-%E5%A4%A7%E5%96%9C%E5%B1%8B-%E9%8A%85%E9%91%BC%E7%81%A3/611742362183110?fref=ts
http://www.forbes.com/sites/caroltice/2014/11/11/10-restaurant-trends-for-that-will-change-what-and-where-you-eat-in-2015/