As restaurants begin to slowly open in the region, many are scrambling to comply to health and safety precautions for customers.
One St. Petersburg startup has pivoted to help.
GoZone WiFi is offering Touchless Menu, an aptly named feature that is exactly what it sounds like. Guests can access a restaurant's food and drink menu by connecting to a WiFi network, which places a digital, touchless menu right on the WiFi-enabled device.
"Menus are a necessity for restaurants and those restaurants right now are spending quite a bit of money on disposable menus and printing costs," Todd Myers, CEO of GoZone WiFi, said. "Not to mention many people don't feel comfortable touching a menu right now. This was a necessity because it gives the restaurant the ability to offer an alternate way to make their customer feel comfortable, with the secondary benefit of flexibility if they have to change prices or items quickly."
Ferg's Sports Bar and American Social have already adopted the new feature.
“Guests need to feel safe and comfortable in coming back to our restaurants,” Mark Ferguson, owner of Ferg's Sports Bar, said in a statement. “Many of my guests feel more comfortable using their personal devices rather than touching a physical menu. Touchless Menu encourages a comfortable experience."
Unlike other companies that have had virtual or digital offerings planned for down the line, Touchless Menu was born roughly four weeks ago as Myers realized the large impact to a bulk of the company's customers.
"It really wasn’t an intentional shift, other than our customer base is primarily restaurants and venues that deal with the public, like stadiums and malls," he said. "We evaluated it and made very quick decisions to implement it. Our platform could very easily adapt to support a touchless menu, but it's also to help the overall customer base as they get through this pandemic. As they reopen the doors, we want make sure we get all the tools available to them."
The offering is free for existing customers, with a small charge for new customers.
"Our No. 1 job is creating tools to help our customer base," Myers said. "The last thing we want to do is raise a bill they might be paying us, or adding a new bill to what they have in place."
GoZone WiFi is a SaaS company founded in 2014 and now has 15 employees. It uses analytics to better tell the venue customers who’s visiting the venue, how many times they’ve been there and then provide marketing tools to allow venues to analyze their business and better target the customers.
It was originally based in Fort Lauderdale but relocated to St. Petersburg after Myers fell in love with the area. The company has 450 clients in 17 countries.
"As we come out of Covid-19, our product and services will be more valuable to venues," Myers said. "Because, again, people are going to be much more reluctant to go to venues. It will be more important to understand who is coming and be able to invite them back and keep them back."
