25 Nov Drive Your Breakroom Experience With Digital Innovations
What do your employees expect when they visit your organization’s breakroom? Perhaps, it’s a welcoming space with freshly brewed coffee or maybe their favorite snacks and refreshing cold beverages.
While sought-after refreshments and a breakroom’s physical space are important, understanding digital innovations connected to the breakroom are also key to creating a positive employee experience.
PepsiCo understands this and has developed Digital Lab, a new product designed to match foodservice operators with digital and online service providers. Scott Finlow, Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo Foodservice explained that “the digital age has disrupted everything – including the way people order, eat and experience food and beverages.”
A common but often misplaced assumption about all things digital is that each time something new is developed, the user experience will become better and better. And that expectation is no different in the breakroom.
However, before choosing a breakroom refreshment provider, employers should take the time to understand two different but equally important factors that have the ability to greatly impact the success of their breakroom services: their employees and the services, insights and digital solutions offered by a specific refreshment provider
Your Employees
As is the case with developing a new product or designing a new space, understanding the user, or in the case of a breakroom, the employees, needs to be the first step in the process. The likelihood of successfully completing a project dramatically decreases when the users or employees are an afterthought.
Most employees are open to experimenting with new technologies that have the potential to improve their breakroom experiences. They want to see speed, ease and personalization as they eat and drink throughout their day. On a basic level, that might mean being able to easily locate nutrition information or an ingredient list. It might also mean having an efficient and seamless experience while paying for a purchase via a micro-market kiosk.
For some digital innovations to be successful, a refreshment provider needs to be able to develop insights into individual employee’s preferences before that employee asks for or purchases a product. That might include making a special offer such as BOGO for a frequently purchased snack when the employee logs into a loyalty account.
Refreshment providers also need to have the flexibility to engage with customers on the platform that each customer prefers. In short, customers get to pick the time and place for engagement.
The Refreshment Provider
How does your refreshment provider manage their digital footprint? What point-of-sale technologies do they offer? How do they manage their online presence and online reviews? Do they have a rewards/promotions program, and how is it implemented?
The answers to these questions can be found by examining several tools available to refreshment providers that have been developed as a result of digital innovation. For example, providers can use purchasing data to understand, predict and influence how employees make buying decisions. In real life, the data can determine the best time, such as at checkout, to deliver personalized content.
Managing an organization’s online presence and reputation requires a different set of digital innovations. Social media accounts or business pages on a variety of platforms enable refreshment providers to promote and manage their digital footprint. A poor online reputation has the potential to transform into negative day to day breakroom experiences.
If you’d like to learn more about digital innovations that can be found in a breakroom or would like to share your favorite breakroom digital innovations on Cool Breakrooms, call (800) 795-6799 today!