Several weeks ago, I went to a Chili’s restaurant for dinner.
After I sat down, before I’d even had my chips and salsa, I noticed a little touch tablet computer on the table. This is a new thing at Chili’s: This nifty little device lets you order food — queso, please! — pay for your meal, offer your insights so the company can give you better customer service in the future, even “rent” little games for your kids to play while they wait for their food to arrive.
Image by Julep67 via Flickr
You know, in case they accidentally left their Nintendo DSes or iPod Touches in the car.
It’s an interesting concept — from a customer service perspective, it takes those the text surveys I’ve mentioned in a couple of past blog posts a couple of steps further. The table tablets definitely have their benefits: Ordering your own food leaves less room for error between the kitchen and the table; streamlining the payment process allows Chili’s to potentially turn tables more quickly; the opportunity to provide feedback on your experience immediately throughout the meal can be nothing but valuable.
But in my mind, the drawbacks to these devices definitely outweigh the benefits. Not for business reasons, but for customer experience reasons. Theoretically, people go out to restaurants as a family to talk to one another, to spend time together.
Now, this little gadget is so cool, so bright and flashy and useful and novel, that everyone at the table is going to want to play with it until dinner comes — which can be 20 or 30 minutes. But it means we’re not talking with each other or spending time interacting with each other. We’re distracted, we’re playing, and we’re not communicating.
We all have enough going on in our lives. As if the TVs in every corner of every bar and restaurant weren’t enough — restaurant patrons don’t need another distraction from their family life. I like the idea of the technology, but I worry about what it’s doing to an already distracted population.
Related articles
- BFF: Customer Experience & Consistency (customerthink.com)
- Chili’s adds pay-at-table systems (business380.com)
- Complaining Via Twitter? Don’t Expect Much. (hubspot.com)
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