Guest-Facing Technology and Service-process Automation

As digitization becomes more common in the hospitality industry, restaurants have increasingly looked to technology-based cashless payment systems to enhance efficiency, improve the service experience, and help mitigate labor-shortage-related issues. Despite numerous benefits of cashless payment systems, many restaurants and their guests resist adopting such systems, partly for fear that technology will take away from or even replace the human nature of service. To better understand how cashless payment systems operate within full-service restaurants (FSRs) and to answer the eight research questions set out here, our team interviewed a number of stakeholders and reviewed existing literature on the implementation of cashless payment systems across various segments of the industry. On balance, we found that the proliferation of cashless payments is inevitable industrywide, and further that cashless payments are becoming more positively received. As a majority of restaurant operators and guests become more comfortable with using cashless technology in conjunction with their restaurant experiences, it should be noted that roughly 20 percent of restaurant guests remain resistant to the use of guest-facing technology