Smart Checkout: Smart cash registers in company restaurants

Context

Lunch break is an essential component of well-being at work. The rise of new catering offers has increased consumer expectations, both in terms of food supply and service quality. Compass Group is undergoing a profound digital transformation in order to make lunch a moment of relaxation and pleasure and to increase their retention rate. With better information on products, a more fluid customer experience, and a range of new services, Compass Group is innovating to meet the new expectations of its customers.

Challenge

Traditional cashing systems involve manual entry by restaurant employees and the average waiting time at the checkout is over 5 minutes. Point-of-sale queues are one of the most frustrating aspects of the customer journey and can lead to a loss of customers. Eliminating friction points is one of the first steps to improving the customer experience.

Solution

In order to cope with the queue at the checkout, Compass Group has developed a Smart checkout solution, leveraging Deepomatic state-of-the-art Computer Vision platform. This intelligent cash register is a world first in the food service industry and reduces the time spent at the check-out to a few seconds.

The smart checkout:

• An easy-to-use cash register terminal equipped with a camera
• Neural networks trained with the Deepomatic Studio® software on 1 million photos, able to recognize more than 10,000 products and/or recipes
• Deployment on the edge with Deepomatic Run® software

In order to ensure the management of new references and the improvement of performance, the Smart Checkout learns from customer’s feedback. Thanks to Deepomatic’s scalable platform, customers’ manual entries, in case of doubt or error, make it possible to enrich the training of neural networks by associating each product or recipe photo with the right reference.

Results

By removing the constraints of traditional checkout, the smart checkout makes the customer experience in restaurants easier.

• Reduction of queues to less than 10 seconds per customer
• 92% of customers are very satisfied after using the smart checkout
• 37 terminals have been deployed and the target is 90 by the end of 2020