Unlocking the IoT Promise for Fast Casual Dining

About Radius Networks

Radius Networks is a location technology company with a mission to improve the guest and employee experience, increase order throughput, and streamline service and delivery options for hospitality clients. Their Customer Location Platform provides proximity-as-a-service to over 30,000 locations across 60 countries. Their clients include some of the world’s largest brands in quick service restaurants, including McDonald’s, Panera, and Chick-Fil-A.

The Challenge

As consumers become increasingly aware of the benefits of a connected world, quick service restaurants (QSRs) are seeking out ways to provide unique and impressive experiences that meet their customers’ rising levels of expectation and demand. The goal is to create happier, more engaged customers who become loyal brand advocates. IoT applications promise to meet this goal while providing impressive business outcomes; however, the infrastructure required to deploy those applications comes with challenges – cost, risk, and complexity – that directly impact the application developer, solution integrator, and facility owners/operators.

Radius Networks’ mission as a Customer Location Platform provider is to improve owner, operator, and customer experiences by helping businesses locate, engage, and transact with their customers for order delivery, messaging, and tracking. To achieve this in fast casual dining, Radius Networks wanted to build a cost-effective Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based location solution that would allow a customer to place an order via mobile app or in-store kiosk or counter, and then identify the customer’s precise onsite location – the result being a unique and more efficient in-store and curbside food delivery experience for both customer and business.

The Solution

Successfully introducing a ready-made, commercial IoT solution into an environment like a restaurant requires flexible, reliable wireless connectivity and the ability to easily deploy at scale. In order to guarantee a continuous exchange of data between devices, Radius Networks needed a partner experienced in low-power wireless systems. To integrate essential real-time data into their Customer Location Platform they also needed a secure sensor-to-server infrastructure that could be deployed and managed locally and scaled to tens of thousands of locations globally.

Rigado provides edge infrastructure for connected hospitality solutions by addressing the key challenges of cost, risk, and complexity. To meet the specific needs of the Radius Networks solution Rigado provided an edge infrastructure leveraging Rigado’s high-performance Bluetooth gateways (typically 4-5 per retail location) to deliver BLE sensor and device data to the Radius Networks location engine and platform. Customer order details, precise on-site device location, and other incoming data trigger notifications that are received in real time by restaurant staff. This enables staff, via a tablet device running the Radius Networks dashboard, to identify customer location for order delivery and service – whether the customer is in-store or curbside. Additionally, real-world data integration introduces business capabilities in areas like staff and inventory tracking, waitlist management, and pay-at-table functionality.

Why Rigado?

End-to-end security

Security is paramount when dealing with sensitive business and consumer data, and is a key concern for Radius Networks and their global brand clients. Rigado gateways are secured at point of manufacture to ensure that a secure device-to-server data chain is achieved – and then maintained with ongoing security updates.

Flexible connectivity

Rigado gateways leverage Bluetooth 5 wireless connectivity to table beacons and mobile devices, and Ethernet (PoE) wired connectivity for ordering kiosks and staff tablets. Additional Wi-Fi, USB, 802.15.4 and cellular LTE options mean that customers can easily connect to nearly any device in a smart retail environment.

Ease of deployment

With standard connectivity and hardware mounting options, along with managed orchestration tools and simple API integration, Rigado makes it easy to successfully deploy a secure, reliable wireless infrastructure to tens of thousands of locations globally.

Built for scale and future-proofing

Installing edge computing-capable gateways means that multiple IoT applications can be deployed and updated as new use cases are developed. By leveraging a common IoT network for those applications there’s no need to install and manage siloed access points.

“Rigado provides secure, scalable

IoT connectivity that allows us to quickly develop and deploy our solutions for connected hospitality. We can help brands launch a reliable, differentiated guest experience even faster, while simultaneously winning the cost efficiencies IoT offers.”

– David Helms, Chief Technology Officer, Radius Networks

The Results

Today, Radius Networks’ quick service restaurant Customer Location Platform enables their clients to measurably improve business metrics in areas like customer satisfaction and loyalty, per-ticket dollar amounts, and operational efficiencies.

• Radius Networks clients report an average decrease of 50 percent in customer issues, complaints, and incorrect orders.
• Overall customer satisfaction, meanwhile, has increased by 20 percent.
• Directly tied to the financials of a store, the average check size has increased by
• about 15 percent while overall guest count increased by 4 percent.

By partnering with Rigado, Radius Networks is able to focus on the applications and customer experiences that help differentiate and add value to their location platform, while not having to worry about the necessary IoT infrastructure.

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