The surprising downsides of self-service places and how restaurants can fix them

When restaurant customers order at a self-service counter while a line appears behind them, they feel rushed, prompting them to buy less and stick to familiar items instead of browsing for something new, according to a recent study we published.

We found that businesses can reduce this stress and increase satisfaction by redesigning their system so that one line of waiting customers leads to multiple kiosks. That way, customers feel less rushed because they aren’t the only ones likely to be queuing.

We are food and beverage marketing experts researching self-service technology. In recent years, many restaurants have adopted automation technology to streamline the menu ordering process and deal with staff shortages. This ultimately gives customers more control over ordering, but the unintended consequence of this seems to be that it makes them feel more responsible for keeping the backlog moving, leading to faster orders.

To understand what’s going on, we conducted three experiments in which we asked hundreds of participants to imagine waiting in line at a restaurant in various situations. We’ve found that many people actually feel pressured to order quickly if there’s a line behind them. This has led to faster decisions and reduced overall spending.

But we also found that retailers can mitigate this in one of two ways: by creating a single line that serves a few kiosks or by displaying a pop-up message on the kiosk interface that says the business takes full responsibility for any service delays during menu orders.

Our research reveals the social dynamics at play in self-organization and we believe it provides important implications for designing an effective and customer-friendly self-service process. It also informs restaurant owners of the potential unintended consequences of switching to automated technology.

Lu Lu is an associate professor of sports, tourism and hospitality management at Temple University and Wangoo Lee is an assistant professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the first article.