Development and evaluation of an RFID-based e-restaurant system for customer-centric service

Traditional restaurant service is passive: waiters must interact with customers directly before processing their orders. However, a high quality customer-centered service system would actively identity customers, their favorite meals and their expenditure records. To achieve this goal, this study integrates radio frequency identification (RFID), wireless local area network (WLAN) and database technologies to develop an e-restaurant system for customer-centric service, which enables waiters to immediately identify customers via RFID-based membership cards and then actively provide customized services. The user interface of the proposed system is built with Visual C# 2005 and eMbedded Visual C++, and the database is built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Server management and statistic reporting. The WLAN and RFID technologies are used to transmit real-time information of each dining table. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed system, a series of experiments was conducted in two restaurants. A questionnaire survey administrated to waiters and customers confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed e-restaurant system in providing customer-centric service. Furthermore, extensive interviews with restaurant owners revealed very positive feedback.