In the restaurant and hospitality industry, where the culinary arts and customer service are too often overshadowed by administrative demands, TouchBistro stands out with its unwavering commitment to helping restaurateurs focus on what they love most: creating exceptional dining experiences.
As the Chief Technology Officer, Amer Matar is at the forefront of this mission, leading his teams in developing functionality and technology to increase revenue and reduce costs for restaurant owners and operators. In this Q&A, Amer shares insights on how TouchBistro is empowering restaurant operators to prioritize their culinary passion and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
Q&A:
Q: TouchBistro’s vision as the leading end-to-end restaurant management solution remains a core driving force for your company. How do you plan to carry forward this vision as CTO?
A: TouchBistro has been consistent with its vision from day one: enabling customer success through innovative technology and experiences, for both the diner and the operator. I plan to carry that vision forward by investing in top talent, continuing engineering excellence to enable scalable business growth and innovation, and working to effectively address the industry’s evolving needs.
We’re seeing an upward trajectory in our growth as the leading end-to-end restaurant management solution. To further serve our customers and remain a leader in the restaurant technology industry, we continue in our focus and our journey to improve our industry leading reliability, resilience and security. We are continually leveraging public cloud capabilities to introduce new features and functionality, drive better digital experiences and allow anytime/anywhere access to critical business data and metrics. Having come from a background of building scale platforms in payments, merchandising and blockchain, I am excited to be a part of the strong company culture and add more talent that drives our roadmap forward, further enhancing our customer’s experience along the way.
Q: Tell us more about your expertise. How will you leverage your background to continue enhancing the TouchBistro experience for operators and diners?
A: TouchBistro has come a long way from its beginnings as a point-of-sale (POS) platform. It has since grown to a comprehensive, end-to-end restaurant management platform, helping operators streamline their processes from front to back of house.
As part of TouchBistro’s mission to create the best experiences, I plan to expand on my experience building teams and platforms that combine both POS software and payments processing and create unique experiences. For every new feature or product, our goal is to elevate the experience for both restaurant operators and their guests. By enhancing every user experience, it correlates to repeat visits. Combined with features that reduce inefficiencies for our operators, the value our platform provides will only strengthen.
Q: What key industry trends are you seeing in restaurant management right now and how has TouchBistro innovated to allow operators to get ahead?
A: Operators are increasingly focused on efficiency, particularly as they scale from single to multi-location businesses. With that, there is a need to provide functionality and visibility across locations and across many digital channels (PC, phone, etc.). This can only be accomplished by building platforms leveraging cloud native, always-on capabilities and therefore our focus has to be on continuing our investments there. This transformation is particularly crucial as it aligns with the increasing adoption of digital solutions for efficient restaurant management. The pandemic underscored the necessity of tech-driven back-of-house operations to enable remote work, maintain social distancing, and streamline processes amidst disruptions. Now, it’s part of the industry’s larger shift to move away from traditional paper-based methods.
At TouchBistro, we’ve embraced these trends by developing a flexible, cloud-native platform that supports multi-location growth and integrates fragmented management tasks into a cohesive system. We constantly innovate based on customer feedback, ensuring our solutions not only meet, but anticipate their needs.
I am excited to energize our innovation efforts and will always be challenging our teams on how we expand digital experiences and reach for our operators. Stay tuned to some of the innovations that we will drive in the next 12 months.
Q: We see the POS and payments services for operators have made huge strides in recent years, especially since the pandemic. What shifts do you see for the industry in the next five years?
A: In the next five years, operators will continue to scale in order to build on the post-pandemic revitalization of the restaurant industry. As they scale, better experiences and seamless integration is a must on both the front and back-end. I am particularly excited about honing in on the digital experience to create more functionality for the operator and a better customer experience for the consumer. For example, a digital receipt can facilitate expense management for the operator and allow for tailored communications to the diner as you can utilize that information to invite a customer back, thank them and much more.
Another shift I could foresee is the increased integration of embedded finance and financial management. Advanced expense management solutions is one area that has tremendous potential as operators focus on efficiency. One example is automated receipt categorization, minimizing the time spent on administrative burden of sorting out invoices.
Embedded payments and embedded finance have been a hot topic for a number of years, and I intend on making these priorities. Imbedded payment can be used to seamlessly identify a returning customer and complete a bill and a payment using credentials on file. It can also be leveraged to initiate supply orders, fulfill a bill of sale and move funds to close off that interaction. In all, it creates an experience where the diner and operator can focus truly just on the food and service.
Q: Are there any upcoming features or products that you’re particularly excited about and can share with us?
A: While inflation has slowed down and we’re seeing more rate cuts, both diners and operators are still feeling the squeeze from cost of living increases. As diners think twice about going out, operators are now needing to shift their focus from price hikes and added service charges, to reducing their expenses in the first place.
We’re excited to continue working on added features and capabilities to our platform that are designed to help operators maximize efficiency in their operations and draw more cost-savings to reinvest in their business strategies.
