Self-service Lavu style
Company rolls out ordering kiosk for restaurants
Restaurants and bars that use Lavu Inc.’s point-of-sale software service can now offer customers self-ordering kiosks.
The Albuquerque company began selling its new kiosk app in October for Lavu-connected businesses through the Apple app store after beta testing it at several service centers in the U.S., including New York University’s Langone Medical Center, said CEO Saleem S. Khatri. An app for Android devices is also ready for imminent release.
“We’ve been working on this awhile,” Khatri said. “We pulled the trigger about three weeks ago. It’s now live for customers to download, and we’re putting new versions with updated features out every week.”
The kiosk allows customers to independently order and pay for their meals, with their menu ticket sent straight to the kitchen for preparation.
“It’s a walk-up device for customers to walk in and select their meals with a few taps of their finger on a touch screen,” Khatri said.
Restaurants can download the app to their own iPads and tablets, or order countertop or wall-mounted stands from Lavu, said company spokesman Lorenzo Romero.
Self-ordering kiosks for food businesses aren’t new, but they’ve generally been deployed by fast-food and quickserve restaurant chains, such as Panera Bread, Taco Bell and McDonald’s, Khatri said. McDonald’s, for example, is expected to have kiosks at most of its 14,000 U.S. locations by 2020.
Lavu, however, is focused on smaller restaurant buinesses.
“Lavu serves the one-to-five location customers who are not as well funded as the larger chains, but they have a deep need for this technology,” Khatri said.
Self-ordering kiosks tend to increase sales for restaurants, because people feel more comfortable with the privacy provided to order more items, Khatri said. And the Lavu software is programmed to “upsell” as patrons make selections, offering side items that frequently accompany main dishes as add-ons.
“Chili’s experienced 20 percent higher check sizes by allowing customers to order independently,” Khatri said.
The software offers additional benefits for restaurant owners, such as customer-order tracking and analytics, interconnection among multi-location establishments for immediate menu updates and sales reporting across all locations. It also has options for add-ons such as nutritional information and alerts on dietary restrictions.
Future features will allow system detection of repeat customer identification through smartphones so that previous orders pop up on the screen for the patron to just reorder meals with a tap of the finger.
The new kiosk is part of Lavu efforts to expand its products and services beyond the company’s staple system that offers restaurants and bars realtime management of all front- and back-end operations on mobile devices through a single, integrated platform.
The homegrown company, which launched in 2010, now has customers in 93 countries. It currently employs about 170 people in Albuquerque and Miami.