Niko Papademetriou is the senior vice president of sales and business development at Qu Beyond POS. Qu’s goal is to go beyond the limited legacy systems with modern tech solutions that will improve your profits and confidently lead you into the new digital era. Given his experience in the financial sector and his entrepreneurial mindset, Niko has fueled restaurant growth by infusing speed, agility, and innovation into restaurant operations.

Here’s one of our highlights from this episode and Niko’s answers to some of our questions:

Featured Takeaway: Engaging customers through restaurant technology

Niko and Zack spent time discussing the evolution of restaurant technology. Niko stressed the point that it’s one thing to have new and improved tech, but its another to be able to gather data from and make effective changes based on that technology.

“Push yourself to be leading edge. Probably not bleeding, but at least leading edge. Otherwise, to your point. You’re yesterday’s news.

. . .You want the guest engagement and insights from that data parallel the data from guest engagement. That’s where all the value is. The question is, how do you make changes based on that engagement level”.

What’s the most important aspect of the guest experience nowadays? (17:01)

Customer Engagement.

“There needs to be a nice, clean way to engage brands and customers right out of the gate. The first touch point is everything. What’s the next most important thing? The first touch after the experience.”

What’s something successful you’ve seen restaurants try lately? (21:58)

Bag stuffers, QR codes, coupons, and other tactics that initiate engagement with the consumer.

Who is someone in the industry that deserves an Ovation? (26:32)

“Our friends up the street at SynergySuite have been a great partner to Qu and to our mutual customers and a great partner to the restaurant industry, quite frankly.

… I want to give an ovation to Greg Staley, who’s the CEO. He’s just one of the most trustworthy and kind people I know.”