The guest experience manager
Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
Esmail Suleiman opened his quick-service Mediterranean restaurant in Denver, Colorado, in the same year the industry couldn’t replace 1 million jobs. However, he found a solution that improved his business’s efficiency and drastically cut labor costs.
Suleiman has been a longtime client of restaurant and hospitality technology solutions Appsuite.
He used AppSuite’s customer loyalty programs and gift card services. But like many restaurateurs, the pandemic created challenges he’d never faced. Even offers of more than $20 per hour weren’t enough to attract new talent to his fast-casual restaurant.
Suleiman has used Appsuite since 2013. After visiting a McDonald’s with a kiosk ordering system in the Middle East, he asked Appsuite programmers to create a similar technology.
“I approached them and said, ‘Why don’t you come up with a kiosk solution?’ And they were initially resistant because that’s not their field,” Suleiman tells GEM Journal Today. “Nevertheless, they took my words to heart and went the extra mile for me.”
Since 2010, James Daleen has built Appsuite to help hospitality and restaurant leadership “leverage technology to increase revenue, loyalty, and customer satisfaction.”
What started as a technology company creating apps for the hospitality industry has grown to include Customer Relationship Management, Multi-Channel Ordering, gift card solutions, customer loyalty programs, POS systems, and kiosks like FelFel.
His technology solutions have grown by partnering Appsuite with cloud-based technology solutions Oracle Hospitality.
“We were pioneers in the restaurant industry with mobile apps. And we knew that mobile technology would change the lives of all of us. That has been our vision and mission from the beginning,” Daleen reflects. “But, like many businesses do when you’re growing, your strategy evolves. Your founding principles don’t really change, and they haven’t in our case. As we’ve grown, our solution footprint has grown dramatically.”
Appsuite now services 2,700+ hospitality partners and processes $100 million in transactions annually.
Suleiman was initially a“test store” for kiosk POS technology. The timing worked perfectly, as restaurant consumer behavior was shifting.
Following the pandemic, fewer consumers wanted to communicate with restaurant staff. The kiosk lets them view menu items, descriptions, and costs before ordering. Suleiman always has one employee on standby in case customers have questions. Overall, it’s improved the guest experience.
“I can run the front of the house with only one person on the expo — just putting the order together, and giving it to the customer,” Suleiman says. “Before, I’d have to have three people just taking the orders and one person putting the orders together.”
Daleen touts the convenience and ease of the technology.
“Everything that we do seamlessly connects to Oracle’s POS system,” Daleen says. “When we do an online or kiosk order, it goes right to our cloud and the Oracle Cloud. That order makes it right into the kitchen without anybody intervening with it.”
Suleiman says using this technology is the “best decision I’ve made for the company.”
“Volume is still going up,” Suleiman says. “Year over year, our labor is still dropping down. We’re around 23.7% right now, so I am happy with the results kiosks have done for us. And if I have more room, I’ll put more kiosks myself.”
