Brinker International Uses Pay-At-Table Technology and a Unified Digital Platform to Enhance the Customer Experience
Brought to you by WBR Insights
As the umbrella organization for the Chili's Grill & Bar and Maggiano's Little Italy family of casual dining restaurants, Brinker International Inc. is an industry leader in providing innovative digital guest experiences. Recently, Brinker has entered a partnership with the restaurant industry's leading end-to-end technology platform to provide pay-at-table services to consumers at most of its 1,250 Chili's Grill & Bar restaurants in the United States.
Looking to provide a unified digital platform for its website, mobile app, and tabletop restaurant devices, Brinker International is also deploying an open-source infrastructure solution to create a more flexible and innovative eCommerce environment for the brand.
Giving Brinker International Customers A New Payment Experience
To increase guest satisfaction, improve productivity, and promote repeat visits from satisfied customers, Brinker International has formed a partnership with Presto, a provider of enterprise-grade technologies to organizations in the restaurant industry. The deal will extend a range of pay-at-table systems to Brinker International's Chili's Grill & Bar restaurants. Most of the 1,250 outlets across the United States will receive pay-at-table technology in 2020, over the course of Brinker's fiscal year.
The new pay-at-table system boasts an extensive feature set housed in a low profile and space-saving industrial design, which will offer a convenient payment mechanism for guests without intruding on their dining experience.
The Presto payment platform supports the latest Europay, Mastercard and Visa (EMV) standards, and mobile payment technologies including Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, Chip-and-PIN, Chip-and-Signature, and PIN-Debit. Payment security includes full P2PE hardware encryption and PTS certified PIN capture, and the majority of credit cards don't have to leave the guest's control.
Providing Greater Personalization
Brinker International's new payment system is still evolving, and tests are being run on new functionality that will enable the pay-at-table platform to keep a record of the dietary preferences, allergies, and other data from guests who choose to share this information. This will enable Chili's Grill & Bar to deliver a highly personalized dining experience.
There's also scope for integration with the My Chili's Rewards guest loyalty program, with new features that will enable members to sign in, view past orders, and re-order their favorite menu items. Guests who have signed into the system can have their payment receipts delivered automatically via email, saving on paper and maximizing convenience.
According to Wade Allen, Chief Digital Officer at Brinker International, "Our guests and operators expect a best-in-class digital experience focused on making their lives easier and improving hospitality. This nationwide pay-at-table technology upgrade to Presto is an important component of our strategy to provide a convenient and personalized guest experience."
Creating A Unified Digital Environment
As an organization committed to providing innovative digital guest experiences, Brinker International has been looking to offer a consistent customer experience that extends across its mobile application, website, in-restaurant table kiosks, and curbside dining facilities. But for a long time, legacy hardware and infrastructure worked against this. Often, the process required for updating website code took several hours, required downtime, and could not guarantee a consistent configuration across the company's IT environment.
In order to unify its infrastructure platforms and increase the adoption of its digital offerings, Brinker needed a fresh approach and a new eCommerce environment.
Open source technology is now providing Brinker International with the innovative capacity and flexibility it requires to build this new environment. Having had a favorable experience from using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Brinker International is using the Red Hat platform as a foundation, both for its eCommerce operations, and to host a new digital curbside service that lets Chili's Grill & Bar guests order using a mobile app, then have their food delivered to their vehicles outside of the restaurant.
For information handling, Brinker is using the container-based persistent data storage of Red Hat Gluster to store guest feedback data and support a variety of environments, including development, testing, integration, and production.
The open-source Linux platform is also providing Red Hat Satellite for resource provisioning, policy enforcement, security, and updates across the company's various digital environments. Predictive analytics is supplied via Red Hat Insights.
The new environment scales to meet peak traffic demands and supports average online ordering traffic from between 10,000 and 20,000 users. Brinker is now expanding its online system to include its franchise venues, as well as its Maggiano's restaurants. The company is also researching other technologies that could help it further enhance and personalize its guest experiences, such as hybrid cloud computing and OpenShift.
As Nathan Huber, enterprise architect at Brinker affirms: "We want to be the leader in the digital guest experience. We want to use smart in-restaurant technology, supported by innovative core infrastructure technologies."
The payment experience, personalization, and the use of innovative technologies are all set to be hot topics at Future Restaurants 2020, which takes place from August 31 - September 01, 2020, at the Hilton Austin, TX. Nicole DaCosta, Senior Manager, Learning & Development at Brinker International, will be one of the keynote speakers.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.
WBR Insights is the custom research division of Worldwide Business Research (WBR). Our mission is to help inform and educate key stakeholders with research-based whitepapers, webinars, digital summits, and other thought-leadership assets while achieving our clients' strategic goals.