The world around us is rapidly changing. After a challenging couple of years, the way people engage and interact with each other has evolved, which influences their attitudes and behaviour. As part of this change, today’s guests have increased expectations, which now include enhanced experiences that are enabled by seamless digital connectivity.

A personalized hotel experience is important to guests, so increased pressure is being placed on those working within the hospitality industry to explore and invest in digital technologies that will meet guests’ enhanced expectations.

To help support the efforts of hotels and deliver value on their digital investments, Samsung Canada offers an array of digital display solutions. Such solutions ensure efficient, high-end connectivity that allows hotels to deliver impeccable service and communication from check-in to checkout and beyond, driving and enhancing guest loyalty. Whether it’s outdoor digital signage that captures guests’ attention or in-suite digital tools that keep guests both informed and entertained, Samsung’s innovative digital solutions support the incredible guest experiences that hotels strive to provide to their guests.

Making a Big Impression with Impactful Digital Signage

It’s no secret the guest experience begins as soon as patrons enter the hotel lobby. To help create an immediate impression that guests will remember, Samsung’s LED displays are an incredibly powerful visual tool. The Wall, for instance, allows hotels to showcase welcome messages for event attendees, or wayfinding information for private functions. And, when the screen isn’t being used to deliver specific messaging, it can be leveraged to display captivating scenes of the city, its landmarks, landscapes, or other local highlights.

Checking-In Made Easier

A growing trend among some travellers today is their increasing desire for a discrete and private check-in experience. Samsung enables this experience with its interactive, self-service Kiosk, which provides guests with the ability to check-in or select upgrades. The Kiosk boasts a compact, space-saving design, advanced security, and easy management and maintenance for reliable performance.

Delivering a Premium In-Suite Experience

For most travellers, a comfortable and seamless in-suite experience is one of the most important aspects of their stay. Samsung’s new generation in-room hospitality TVs with QLED display technology for deeper contrast and exceptional brightness featuring Samsung’s new content management system, LYNK Cloud, provide a gateway to hotel information, services, and activities. It’s a way for hotels to provide a new level of interactivity for their guests, which includes opportunities and access to new experiences in a personalized manner, allowing guests to order room service, view menus and check out easily and conveniently.

Digital Concierge Stations

Digital touch screen displays can also be used to provide guests with real-time information regarding local restaurants, sporting and entertainment events as well as airport and airline updates. Serving a similar function as a mobile device, a digital concierge station helps fulfil guests’ search needs while encouraging essential personalized engagement with the hotel.

Augmented Signage for Additional Revenue

Elevators can also be outfitted with Samsung digital displays to provide guests with news, weather, directions to hotel amenities, or special information specific to the hotel. For example, a digital display can promote the hotel’s restaurant, café, bar and gift shop by displaying timely deals, menu boards, upsell opportunities and special promo offers, generating additional revenue for the hotel.

Outdoor Signage

With the latest fully integrated and contained outdoor signage technology that can withstand different weather elements, hotels can reach potential guests with messages promoting different services and offerings like free Wi-Fi, complimentary breakfast, parking, discounted nightly rates, or seasonal partnerships with local restaurants. This provides hotels with yet another way to increase revenue.

In an ever-changing world and continuously evolving hospitality landscape, hotels are always exploring new ways to “wow” their guests and provide them with an exceptional experience during their travels. Through its innovative digital display technology, Samsung is helping the industry achieve that goal.

Canada’s foodservice industry is undergoing some of the most dramatic changes it has experienced to date, and digital display technology is increasingly central to its new reality. To remain relevant and meet consumer expectations, operators in the Canadian chain foodservice industry will need to increasingly rely on technologies like digital and interactive signage – both in front of customers and behind the counter.

Between lockdowns, shifts in consumer habits and disrupted supply chains, operators have had to make dramatic adjustments to how they do business — and digital signage technology has been a huge part of enabling positive change.

Digital signage technology has become a key tool to keep customers informed and satisfied in the quick service restaurant industry. Screens in targeted positions attract diners, display promotions and support hungry consumers to make quick and informed decisions about their next meal. Operators have adopted digital signage management systems and display technology to pre-sell and promote specials and overstocks on digital posters, raise awareness of the company’s community contributions and ties, recruit new full and part-time workers and brand the chain on dining area displays. Digital signage displays, such as the Samsung SMART Signage QBR/QMR Series, are now common at order counters and rapidly finding their way throughout restaurants — and outside with the Samsung Outdoor Display OHF Series, as curbside and drive-thru services see increased demand in 2020.

However, there has been a recent shift toward digital displays to address the business challenges introduced by COVID-19. When operators evolve from static, printed poster material to digital menus and promotions, they gain incredible flexibility. Updates take minutes — not days or weeks. And digital menus pay their way by influencing ordering decisions and removing the printing, shipping and labour costs of printed signs and posters. Restaurant operators who suddenly couldn’t open their dine-in areas had to rely entirely on drive-thru lanes and pickup windows to service their hungry customers. Drive-thrus are a big part of quick service restaurant chains, but amid health and safety restrictions, drive-thrus have come to represent a significant percentage of sales.

Outdoor digital menu boards in drive-thrus have recently seen a dramatic rise in popularity. The Samsung Outdoor Display OHF Series is bright enough to handle the glare and heat of the sun[1] and can both inform and pre-sell to customers as they approach the ordering position. Beyond drive-thru digital menu boards, outdoor signage also offers an effective, hard-to-miss way to communicate business changes, such as operating hours, dine-in reopening or other topical messaging. Outdoor displays from Samsung feature a slim depth (85 mm) design and the added convenience of an embedded power box. They also boast durability, flexibility and 24/7 performance, even in extreme temperatures[2].

Delivery has been a saviour for operators without drive-thrus. Ordering ahead has dramatically increased in popularity, with operators keeping their staff and customers safe by offering curbside pickup. Super-bright window displays visible from the parking lot, as well as outdoor-ready screens, act as beacons that guide diners. Tied to the brand’s online ordering platform, software drives messaging to the screens, letting motorists know their order status. With food delivery becoming hugely popular and multiple app-driven services fulfilling remote orders, we’re seeing more screens in meal preparation areas to dynamically track orders and drivers — like an airport displays flight gates and times.

Bright window displays also drive awareness of order-ahead options as operators are opting for Samsung’s unique double-sided displays. The OMN-D Series from Samsung is a dual display with screens on both sides, allowing restaurants to maximize messaging. The outward-facing screen handles ordering, while the inward-facing screen promotes special offers and helps recruit new staff members. At 3,000 nits, the screen facing the street is bright enough to win any battle with ambient or direct sunlight, ensuring messages are visible to viewers even on the brightest of days. The reverse side, facing into the store, doesn’t need that level of brightness, but at 1,000 nits will overpower any potential glare from restaurant lighting.

Content management software, such as Samsung’s MagicINFO, make it possible for owners and operators to fully view and control what’s happening on all of their displays, inside and outside. That toolset can be operated from a PC on-premise, or managers can control messaging for one or many locations from a distant office, or even from their home.

Understanding customer behaviours and patterns enables operators to directly influence what people see on menu and promotions screens inside stores and in drive-thru lanes. Data harvested from sales, loyalty and analytics systems can produce insights and directions that will then shape and trigger the content and even the layout of what’s on the digital signage screens in front of people. So, layouts and menu options are not only changeable by time of day and location, but can also be amended to reflect segmentation on diner types.

Making the right choice before screens and related technologies are ordered can go a long way toward ensuring success in sales, order sizes and transaction speeds. The key to QSR success will always be delicious food and swift, friendly service, but digital signage is playing an ever more important role in making diners aware of what’s cooking, simplifying order and pickup routines and ensuring the process is progressing smoothly and efficiently.

Digital displays have become central to how many QSRs do business, and in the COVID-19 era, benefits of premium displays are even more evident. For more information on Samsung Digital Display solutions, visit Samsung.com/ca/business or click here if you would like to connect with a Samsung Signage Specialist to assist you with your specific requirements.

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[1] The OHF Series displays feature innovative Magic Glass, TUV-certified image quality and an Auto Brightness sensor to improve picture quality and optimize message delivery for any viewer. The OHF series displays have been verified and validated by TUV Rheinland, a leading international certification organization.

[2] Each OHF Series display undergoes rigorous IP56 ingress defense testing* to ensure resistance to dust, heat, moisture and other environmental variables that can impede operations. IP ingress defense testing helps to determine a product’s susceptibility to solid particle (including dust) ingress and liquid (water) ingress. IP56: Protected from high-pressure water jets from any direction, limited ingress protection.

Digital displays offer flexibility and create efficiencies

In recent years, operators in the Canadian foodservice industry have adopted digital signage management systems and display technology to communicate menu items, new products and promotions on digital menu boards above and behind the counter. They have also implemented digital displays to pre-sell and promote specials, as well as raise awareness of the company’s community contributions and recruit new full-time and part-time employees.
 
The most prevalent use of digital signage is the array of menus behind ordering counters. Digital menu boards, such as the Samsung SMART Signage QBR/QMR Series, provide the ability to change menus without having them printed and delivered multiple times every year. Using digital signage technology, changes to menus are scheduled and automated, and can even be tied to restaurant management systems, so that out of stock menu items can automatically disappear from menu screens. As customers now expect to see what they are ordering, with Samsung SMART Signage, operators can rotate lifelike images through ultra high-definition resolution.
 
Quick service restaurants want to provide their customers a vivid and unique experience through lively, immersive video wall content, while also providing necessary information about their menu offerings and ingredients. With the VMR-U Video Wall Series from Samsung, operators can display dynamic content with visual impact to grab customers’ attention and provide them with key information. This efficient system on chip (SoC) embedded video wall can easily transform screens from displaying standalone content to operating as one cohesive unit, without the need for additional hardware.
 

Digital signage works in any environment

The recent wave of digital display adoption has involved outdoor drive-thru areas, with daylight-readable screens replacing printed pre-sell and menu posters. With outdoor digital signage, such as the Samsung Outdoor Display OHF Series, changes take a matter of minutes, as messages are fine-tuned and promotions catered to consumers rolling into drive-thru lanes. Outdoor displays from Samsung feature a slim depth (85 mm.) design and the added convenience of an embedded power box. They also boast durability, flexibility and 24/7 performance, even in extreme temperatures.
 
Moreover, in a study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Samsung^[1], digital signage in drive-thru lanes decreases drive-thru times, reduces food waste due to improved order accuracy, and reduces the labour costs of printing, shipping and putting new posters in place.
 
Ultimately, between boosted sales and better experiences for customers, outdoor digital menus will gradually be as common in drive-thrus as the menu displays inside quick service restaurants. Operators are no longer talking about trying out digital; they are talking about rollouts. Because of the enhanced, personalized customer experience digital menu boards bring, restaurants are in a position to upgrade their old displays and start reaping significant financial benefits from these new digital displays.
 

Interactive digital marketing solutions for store fronts work inside and out

Just about any business with a street-level presence has the opportunity to use window marketing to drive sales and boost their communications strategy. Putting a bright digital display in a storefront can be an effective way to market to passersby and drive foot traffic through the front doors. However, using that technology has tended to come with a compromise: screens look great from the outside, but staff and visitors on the inside see the back end of a display or its enclosure.
 
That is where Samsung’s dual-sided LCD screens are filling a need. The OMN-D Series from Samsung is a dual display with screens on both sides, allowing restaurants to maximize messaging. The window-facing screen features bright visuals and prominent positioning, giving passerby’s motivation to enter the restaurant. Once inside, indoor-facing displays enhance the dining experience with relevant content, such as menus or promotions. This single display reduces equipment and installation costs, increasing operational efficiency, compared to installing two separate displays.
 
Moreover, when it comes to watching the big game, major restaurant chains in the foodservice industry are continuing to deliver incredible entertainment options. Sports and entertainment-themed restaurants are evolving from using single TVs suspended from ceilings to installing giant video walls that can show the big game — or be segmented to show multiple games at once.
 
With the Extreme Narrow Bezel Video Wall UHF-E/UMH-E Series from Samsung, diners can enjoy an immersive, near-seamless viewing experience for catching every play in the game. These video walls feature an extreme narrow-bezel (1.7mm.) that produces a near-seamless picture across multiple screens without interruption, generating countless opportunities to captivate customers. Another option are direct-view LED screens that counteract direct sun and glare, making them better suited for locations flooded by natural sunlight.
 

Display Technology and the Evolution of Dining

As the Canadian foodservice industry continues to undergo dramatic changes, operators are tailoring their technology investments to meet consumers’ heightened demand for a more personalized dining experience. Getting the experience right is critical because consumers have so many options, and because technology presents a key opportunity for restaurant operators to differentiate and compete in the mobile ordering and delivery industry. Indeed, the future of quick service restaurants is rooted in a technology-driven experience reflected in digital displays, both inside and out.
 
For more information on Samsung Digital Display solutions, visit www.samsung.com/ca/smartsignage.
 
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^[1]Source: The Total Economic Impact Of Samsung Outdoor Digital Menu Boards (Forrester Consulting, February 2017)