The covid-19 pandemic has marked a turning point in the digitization process of the restaurant sector. In recent months, the vast majority of hospitality establishments have made progress in the digital transformation of their services in order to offer their customers a safer experience with as little contact as possible.

Thus, currently bars and restaurants have advanced in the use of technological applications that facilitate the management of home orders and in their own premises they have replaced paper with QR codes as a method of access for customers to their letter and its menus.

In this way, customers no longer have to wait for the waiter to bring them the menu to decide what they want to eat or drink, but can consult it whenever they want and even, in some establishments, place their order through of the application made available by the restaurant.

However, there is a fundamental part of the relationship between the client and the establishment during the service in which the intervention of the staff is still necessary: ​​the moment of paying. Who has not had to wait longer than desired for the waiter to bring the bill?

To make this daily gesture more agile and to make the customer experience at payment time quicker, the startup Cheerfy, which operates in the United Kingdom and Spain, has developed its own platform that digitizes the ticket and allows the customer to pay the account without the need for local staff to intervene.

Cheerfy Pay Options

Thanks to Cheerfy Pay, when the customer decides that the time has come to pay, they only have to scan the QR code printed on a discreet wooden support on their table , as explained to D+I by the co-founder and CEO of Cheerfy, Carlos Gómez.

Once scanned, the digital receipt will appear on the screen of your mobile phone with all the products you have consumed. In fact, this digital account is created as soon as the customer places their first order and is updated as diners request more things.

Before paying, the client can also make other decisions such as including the tip for the service or dividing the amount of the bill among the different clients in the way they decide. Finally, the payment is made from the bank card of each of the diners, without the need for a waiter to mediate with his dataphone.

Gómez points out that this system, which is scalable so that the premises can include all the services they want in the bill, makes it possible to do something faster that until now required the presence of the waiter, who will be able to dedicate their time to doing other jobs that add more value to the customer than collect the bill.

Online ordering system

The solution is integrated with the startup's loyalty solution, Cheerfy Loyalty, the service with which the company debuted in Spain and which offers customers the possibility of Register in the loyalty program directly through the restaurant's Wi-Fi, without the need to download any application.

In addition to its loyalty and payment services, the startup also has Cheerfy Shop, a service for restaurants to directly manage online orders, ceasing to depend on delivery platforms that act as intermediaries between the customer and establishment.

Gómez points out that covid-19 forced the company to rethink its model, since with the restaurants closed its loyalty service made no sense. For this reason, they developed their ordering platform in record time, which also means cost savings for the restaurant compared to the costs of a marketplace.

The CEO of Cheerfy points out that the pandemic has given a boost to digitalization, but it is still in a very incipient state. In fact, he points out that this industry is "at 1%" in terms of its digital transformation and practically "everything remains to be done."

Partnership with Grosso Napoletano

Cheerfy is backed by the American Techstars Ventures (a firm that has invested in Uber and Twilio) and the German METRO AG and has the trust of large operators such as Avanza Food (with brands such as Carl's Jr. and Tony Roma's) and other global companies including Black Sheep Coffee, Maison Kayser, Le Pain Quotidien or New York Burger.

And in Spain an important ally of the company is Grosso Napoletano. Cheerfy is testing its payment system with the artisan Neapolitan pizza chain founded by Hugo Rodríguez de Prada and Jorge Blas. Grosso Napoletano started its activity in February 2017 with a store on Calle Hermosilla in Madrid and currently has 12 stores, distributed between Madrid (9), Majadahonda, Valencia and Barcelona, ​​and an ambitious growth plan.

The relationship between Cheerfy and Grosso Napoletano goes back to the beginnings of the startup in Spain. As the director of technology and analytics at Grosso Napoletano, Javier Contreras, explains, the company decided to bet on Cheerfy's loyalty solution that allowed all customer information to be brought together to give them better service on future visits without forcing them to get a card. or download an app.

Subsequently, with the arrival of the crisis, they also opted for the Cheerfy order solution to create their own system on their website. In this way, the customers most loyal to the brand could order their products without resorting to intermediaries and the chain maintain a relationship with its customers in all channels, with the aim of providing each person with the best possible service.

And now, Grosso wants to continue improving the experience of its users thanks to Cheerfy Pay, taking advantage of the fact that with the pandemic the customer has become accustomed to a more digital experience. In fact, Contreras highlights the resurgence that QR codes have registered thanks to the covid, which has made their use widespread overnight.

And the reception of Cheerfy Pay in the first tests carried out in some of the pizza chain's stores has been very positive. Without the staff advertising this service, 20% of the bills are already paid in these establishments through this system and their intention is for this percentage to exceed 50%.

All this digitization of the customer experience is also accompanied by a digitization of the chain's operations, which has allowed the company, for example, to improve demand management thanks to the use of the data it obtains with the digitization of orders.

On the other hand, Contreras emphasizes that the success of Grosso Napoletano reflects the quality of its offer in all aspects. In fact, he highlighted that the brand has recently been chosen among the ten best artisan pizzeria chains in the world, which is drawn up each year by the prestigious international 50 Top Pizza ranking, and is also the only Spanish company present on the list.

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