Future Tense

I am not a tech geek. Though gadgets fascinate me, I am a technophobe at heart. What’s more, when it comes to the restaurant business, I try to always remember that it’s really a hospitality business. People smarts and a smile beat automation at every turn. But, once in a while, a product comes along that will fundamentally alter the way the game is played—and may change the playing field as well. So trust me when I say that in a few years everyone will have ESP.

According to a Cornell University study, 13 percent of restaurant customers go away, never to return, because of bad service. ESP is the brainchild of Devin Green, an entrepreneur who sensed that the restaurant service model was fundamentally broken. Restaurants live on loyalty and wither on the vine because of bad or indifferent service. Green’s product is a Microsoft platform that wirelessly links a device, a “hub,” on the customer’s table to one worn on the wrists of servers, managers, and kitchen staff. Guests manage their experience by communicating through the device. Employees can also communicate with each other; waitresses can pay attention to customers, not the kitchen.

Need a drink, a new fork, ready for your bill? Hit a button. Servers can ask other servers for help, the kitchen can alert servers when food is ready. Every aspect of the restaurant can be made faster and smarter. Customers only need about thirty seconds to learn how to use the device. Best of all, management can see if a server is in the weeds because he has not responded to a table’s request for another order of chili-cheese fries.

The ESP system is in every Fatz Cafe in the country, thirty-one units in the southeast. Applebee’s and T.G.I. Friday’s are alpha testing it. As of today, ESP is available to any restaurant nationwide that’s interested in having it. According to Green, servers report higher tips, tables turn over more quickly, and time saved per diner over the course of an evening is more than 10 percent. That means big bottom-line results.

Higher-end tablecloth restaurants traditionally are slowest to warm to these types of ideas. And why should a small mom-and-pop eighty-seat café want the system? But Green is so confident about the value of ESP for every restaurant that his company offers it for no money down. Restaurants lease ESP for monthly fees based on the size of the restaurant, with no long-term commitment. The units are installed overnight and are ready to go the next morning. Green insists the system pays for itself every month.

Now based on how I’m touting it, you’d think I owned stock in ESP, but I have no stake in it whatsoever. Remember, restaurants are a “pennies” business, where having a good year means being able to stay open the next, so this is big stuff. Restaurants will inevitably be able to operate with less staff, which is huge.

Many laughed at computer-based wine lists or online reservation systems such as opentable.com. I can remember when computerized order entry and bill-management systems first came into restaurants and many in the business scoffed. No one thought they would ever be more than a cute tech toy and surely never a reliable replacement for handwritten duplicate paper checks.

A quarter of a century later, a restaurant would never think of opening without such a system, regardless of price point or service style. Many staffers will gripe about the Big Brother aspect of all this, and the prospect of fewer jobs that efficiency brings to any business, but the bottom line is clear: More restaurants will stay in business and become more profitable if they can live up to their goal of making the customer’s experience near perfect.