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Digital Menu Boards: Balancing Reliability, Innovation, and Integration
Essentials to guard against downtime and keep your critical systems online
Indoor and outdoor digital menu boards are a critical component of effective quick service restaurant operations, delivering essential information, driving revenue, and ensuring customer satisfaction. Kevin Jones, VP of QSR and Hospitality at Mood Media outlines the key considerations to keep in mind when choosing a new digital menu board provider.
Over the past 15 years, the quick service restaurant industry has transitioned from traditional print signage to digital menu boards. There are several benefits to making the switch; digital menu boards allow content to be centrally monitored and updated, changes can be made instantly without incurring additional print costs, visibility is improved in adverse weather conditions and after dark, and the advent of AI is making menu content personalization a real possibility.
However, digital menu boards also require considerable investment and become integral to restaurants’ everyday operations; when they fail, customer experience, brand sentiment, and revenue are all at risk.
That’s why it’s important that brands choose to partner with a digital menu board provider that takes care of the fundamentals but also balances the need for reliability with seamless integrations and continual innovation.
Providers That Streamline the Digital Menu Board Solution
An effective digital menu board solution involves many moving parts. The screens, the mounting, the content, the technology, the networking, and the ongoing maintenance are all critical components to consider. Every element must work together to deliver the speed of service that today’s QSR and fast casual customer expects.
An end-to-end provider can cut through this complexity, streamlining the installation process and overseeing the day-to-day operation to ensure continuity of service. The best partners take the time to understand your brand’s unique needs and use their expertise to recommend a blend of hardware, software, and creative content that meets your exact requirements.
Several companies specialize in one element, but juggling multiple partners, contracts, payment terms, and SLAs can quickly become a costly and time-consuming headache. It also means you may miss out on the insights partners that work across different industries can provide. A cutting-edge LED display with exceptional clarity might catch your eye, but it’s not enough to guarantee an effective digital menu board system.
“State-of-the-art technology is only part of the story,” Kevin explains. “Brands might be intrigued by innovation but do those providers understand how to support companies with a global footprint, how the technology is deployed, and how it needs to be maintained? Look for a team that can work with corporate at an enterprise strategic level while simultaneously deploying the solution across thousands of individual franchise locations.”
“Taking an agnostic approach to hardware integration means that a team isn’t restricted to a certain operating system, screen type, or media player manufacturer,” Kevin clarifies. “Not only can this deliver the best value as the team is able to impartially evaluate the best solution for that customer, but it also offsets potential supply chain issues.”
Taking An Agnostic Approach to Hardware Integration
When it comes to installing new indoor and outdoor digital menu boards, hardware is often the first priority. High quality displays enhance reliability, provide exceptional visibility, and contribute to energy efficiency whether they’re produced by Samsung, LG, Philips, or a similar leading manufacturer.
Issues often only arise when a partner has an exclusive relationship with a single manufacturer and the supply chain is interrupted. Partners who are more flexible and simply favor the best fit for their client are insulated from the impact of temporary problems like a sudden shortage of chips.
Elevating Digital Menu Content
Partnering with trusted external suppliers is important, especially when it comes to the hardware, but having proprietary operating software in-house can elevate a digital menu board solution from simply satisfactory to exceptional.
An in-house CMS is fully customizable, ensures security compliance, and enables integrations with the restaurant’s entire technology ecosystem including its POS, interactive kiosks, employee communications, and traditional print signage. It also means that restaurant managers and franchise owners can be empowered to make approved menu adjustments (within strict guardrails) while corporate authorization structures are maintained through user permissions.
With a CMS in place, dynamic content management is made simple. Digital menu boards can be instantly updated to reflect pricing changes, promote limited time offers, and remove sold out items to maintain menu accuracy and avoid customer disappointment.
The growth of AI is also teasing the possibility of automating these updates based on day-part or current weather conditions, for example, and increasing the level of personalization customers receive when they pull up at the drive-thru.
Forward-thinking providers are already exploring these opportunities. As Kevin puts it: “Continual innovation means refusing to stagnate. The best digital menu board providers have tech and engineering teams actively engaged in the industry, attending conferences and experimenting with emerging technology like AI to ensure their solution remains best-in-class.”
“Reporting is best served when it works in conjunction with the restaurant and their point of sale because we can take their actual sales data and marry it up with their content data to prove ROI,” explains Kevin. “By comparing activity at different locations, you can quickly start to see how the menu board content has driven incremental sales.”
Limiting Digital Menu Board Downtime
Digital menu boards are integral to a restaurant’s smooth operation. When the system fails, orders are lost, customers are left dissatisfied, and brand reputation is negatively impacted. In the fast-moving QSR industry, every second of downtime counts.
When evaluating a digital menu board partner, those who follow up the initial installation with a managed services plan can provide peace of mind and help to protect your investment.
Any managed services plan should be tailored to your budget and scope. Combining preventative maintenance with proactive monitoring reduces future repair costs, optimizes operations, and ensures any issues are rapidly resolved, either remotely or via an on-site visit. A spare pool service can also limit downtime by replacing essential hardware with no ordering delays while black screen monitoring immediately detects a menu board outage and issues an automatic alert.
The importance of system uptime is seen through the metrics. Proving ROI requires a careful balance between customer privacy and data insights, but providers should be able to supply reporting on the functionality of your digital menu boards (uptime vs. downtime) as well as how many times a piece of content has been played.
The Benefits of Tailored Onboarding
No matter whether you’re exploring digital menu boards for the first time or you’re well versed in the technology but are looking for a new delivery partner, the onboarding process can be make or break.
To ensure success, a robust discovery phase should precede any contract. This time should be spent exploring the overall content strategy alongside discovering the resource the brand has available, how much can be handled in-house, what equipment has been used in the past, what tech stack is in place, and how each restaurant is laid out.
Ideally, every partnership should be rooted in a collaboration that continues to evolve once the solution is in place and operating well.
“The most effective implementation comes from collaboration,” Kevin shares. “As well as understanding a brand’s priorities, partners should make the effort to visit stores and use this first-hand research and their expertise to present different concepts, explaining the costs, benefits, and considerations of each option. A testing phase can also be used to ensure the right solution is implemented across the network.”
Your digital menu board partner should be actively looking for optimizations throughout your partnership. Taking industry learnings and new innovations into account to ensure the solution continues to deliver on all fronts, from ROI to customer satisfaction scores.
Interested in learning more about Mood Media’s approach to digital menu boards? Get in touch today!
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