Many merchants still hesitate on newer payment methods like Apple pay and Google Pay. Our Restaurant Readiness Index, for example, found that a whopping 94.1 percent of customers have a positive experience with Apple Pay, while only 70 percent of managers do. Regardless, adoption of NFC payments and contactless cards in the food and beverage space still hovers in the single digits. Why? It could be that acceptance is varied and often not clearly marked, so customers default to swipes, chip-inserts or cash. But what happens when customers know a merchant consistently takes those payments?
National Instruments (NI) and their foodservice management contractor, Compass group, found out when they began work with Bypass. Along with our backend capabilities, we enabled NI and Compass to take almost any form of payment on our Clover hardware, including mobile NFC. Corporate cafes make the perfect testing environment for mobile adoption: nearly your entire customer base is repeat visitors, many of them several days a week.
While they expected some users to start paying with their phones and smartwatches, neither they nor we expected just how high adoption would be: a whopping 41 percent of all transactions in 2018 were tap-based, 9.3x higher than the national average.
While that’s an impressive number in itself, what’s even more impressive is what it did to transaction speeds. Like any other restaurant, NI’s cafe has peak periods where they need to get a large number of people through the line. Bypass’s NFC acceptance did just that, with peak speeds of six transactions per minute. That’s a customer walking up to the register, getting rung up and paying in an average of only 10 seconds.
“At our busiest, we now only have three or four people waiting. Our lines are moving four times faster with Bypass during peak times,” said John Bay, General Manager at National Instruments Cafe,
What’s next for Bypass, NI and Compass? National Instruments plans to continue to focus on customer experience, including testing out new options for its guests like online ordering and self-service kiosks. As NI and Compass continue to innovate, they’ll look to Bypass to understand the behavior of their customers and employees, and how to best keep evolving to meet the needs of National Instruments employees.