Beacons Will Be The Waiters At This Tokyo Restaurant

If there’s anything Japan is famous for, it’s comprehensive cell phone use and impeccable customer service. Case in point: Smartphone use is so ubiquitous that some rush-hour subway trains don’t allow calls for the calm of fellow passengers, and even clerks at 7-Elevens greet each customer with an overenthusiastic welcome phrase.

When technological and human service trends collide, though — as they are at one restaurant in Tokyo — the results can be equal parts dazzling and problematic.

Mobile Commerce Daily has the story of Frames Cafe, which has partnered with Teijin Limited to employ beacons at its fast-casual Tokyo location. Situated just above a popular club, Frames gets a big late-night crowd that’s more interested in getting their food fast than they are with hot towel service. Instead of bothering with waitstaff to seat and serve hungry clubgoers — and add another potential speed bump in between them and their food — the idea instead is to allow customers to order food straight from their phones and to use beacons to help runners locate the tables they originated at for streamlined fulfillment as fast as possible.

However, Tokyo’s status as a world-class city (and its nightclub’s status, too) makes Frames a destination for plenty of foreign tourists, who can’t speak a lick of Japanese to save their lives (and even less after a night of heavy drinking around town). Obviously, this can be a nightmare for a restaurant that sees most of its business after midnight — even those with full waitstaffs might not employ servers who can speak enough languages fluently enough to keep every multilingual customer happy.

Fortunately, Frames’ beacon ordering system has a clever workaround. Instead of having human languages be a human problem, the digital ordering system presents the menu in 10 different languages. On the way to the kitchen, these orders are converted into Japanese for the back-of-the-house staff, who might not even know they’re cooking for Dutch, American and Chinese customers all at the same time.

Frames Cafe has found a masterful application of beacon technology that helps it both maximize efficiency and solve a linguistic hurdle. While Teijin told Mobile Commerce Daily that it plans on rolling out its foreigner-friendly restaurant app and order platform to any Tokyo eatery that wants it, the true test for its system might not come until 2020 when Tokyo hosts the Olympic Games. Not only will swelling crowds stress the city’s restaurants to a breaking point, but the vast majority of them won’t even attempt to learn how to order a burger in a Japanese restaurant before booking their trips.

Interestingly, this attitude of accommodation toward tourists is something of a recent trend, especially when it comes to something as traditional to Japan as its language. The Japan Times reported that the Japan Tourism Agency recently recommended that onsen owners — resort spas built around natural hot springs — walk back from a long-held ban on serving guests with visible tattoos. Because of deep associations between body art and criminal organizations in Japan, even tourists have been asked to leave or cover up their ink before being allowed entry.

The implementation of a foreigner-friendly beacon translation system in one Tokyo restaurant hardly indicates a paradigm shift for customer service practices, but it could open up new pathways to bridge cross-cultural divides. Retailers don’t have to fill themselves on goodwill alone, though. Mobile Commerce Daily noted that Frames Cafe’s bills increased by about 30 percent since implementing the streamlined ordering system.

However the system fares in the future, its success at the moment probably didn’t please the waitstaff it replaced — if only they could speak 10 languages like it can.