SmartOrder Technology is a software company that provides innovative portable tablet technology solution to improve the overall dining experience. The company uses Google android operation system and Apple iOS as its foundation, and with the help of web technology to improve the customer user experience.
The motivation behind the company came from a common problem when dining in a restaurant. The most common problem that you encounter is probably waiting to order food, drinks or even the bill. This problem not only affects customers but also affects the restaurant owner. Customers spend most of their time waiting to order food, which makes the restaurant less productive in maximising their revenue. For many customers, their intention is to finish their meal and leave the restaurant.
Secondly, the cost of running a restaurant increases year after year. For example, in the UK the minimum wage has gone from 5.05 in 2006 to 6.08 in 2012, that's 20% of incensement in just five years. Living in London for about a year I know that the restaurants are paying higher wages than the minimum wage. Therefore, restaurants are always trying to decrease the number of employees. Human errors also create issues for restaurant owners, order duplication, miss communication, error in order priority. All these create a negative impression to the customers and decrease customer satisfaction, as a result the customer may not want to return in the future.
The solution to the problem is to build a self-servicing system that allows customers to order at their table by engaging the menu application on a portable, web-enabled, interactive touch screen device. A self-service menu linked to different units in the restaurant, creates a myriad of operations-enhancing benefits that virtually guarantee incremental revenue and profit for the restaurant.
Self-servicing system was introduced over five years ago, but at that time the implementation cost was over the possible return profit. Therefore, has never been deployed in major restaurants. At that time, a simple self-ordering system require large amount of investment. However in recent year, the advancement of the tablet device has been very rapid. Five years ago, a normal tablet would have cost over HK$ 5,000 with a very bad specification. However, nowadays you would be able to buy a reasonable good specification tablet in most electronic retailers for only HK$ 1,000. In addition, customers are now more familiar to self-servicing, retailer like Tesco, M&S introduced self-servicing for over five years and perfer using portable touch screen electronic device (i.e. smartphone, ipad).
