Mundane and impersonal things like ordering and waiting on the phone or in line at a restaurant aren’t driving customer satisfaction. But what Panera Delivery has discovered is that speed, efficiency, and ease outrank interpersonal communication. This return might be surprising given the hospitality’s long-standing belief that face-to-face service is what builds customer satisfaction. If you go through a third party, you don’t have that visibility.” As the Panera EVP chief growth and strategy officer reported to Forbes, customers “purchases go up, their frequency goes up and the incremental value of their orders go up. The brand, in return, collects data and receives deeper insight into their customer’s behavior than if they partnered with a third party like GrubHub or Uber Eats. This omnichannel approach lets customers interact with the brand across multiple touchpoints, thereby exercising a new degree of control over their Panera experience.Ĭonsumers can order lunch and dinner service from the Panera website or from their mobile app. Panera’s digital channels include the company’s smartphone app, Google Assistant integration, and self-order kiosks in-store at select Panera locations. Lesson #1: Panera Delivery shows that consumers want to self-orderĪt Panera, 30% of sales come from the brand’s digital channels. Investing in digital and catering pays off – here’s what hoteliers can learn from the phenomenal success of Panera 2.0. The hospitality industry can learn plenty from Panera’s proactive digital transformation strategy. Within this initiative, Panera has focused its technology investment on opening new digital channels, launching an in-house delivery fleet, providing new ways to surprise and delight customers, and future-proofing their sales. Panera 2.0 is the title of the company’s commitment to digitizing the ordering experience that launched in 2014. Luckily, the success of Panera delivery and it's overall digital strategy and its commitment to investing in technology, even when the market segment suffers from declining sales, provide a blueprint for fortifying sales at your property and meeting evolving guest demands. Worried about a recession? A new survey reports that 97% of CFOs believe there will be an economic slowdown before the end of 2020.

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