Unlocking Revenue Growth: How Technology Enhances F&B Operations - Christine Lising, Shiji [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: I would love our listeners to get to know you a little bit and Shiji Group a bit. I wonder if we could spend a few moments talking about your career, just for people to get to know you a little bit. And then I want to talk about Shiji Group, all the things that you're offering there. And then we're going to spend the bulk of our conversation talking about trends, what our listeners can do about that. But yeah, just to kick us off, can we spend a couple of minutes talking a little bit about how you got into the work that you're doing today? And then we'll talk about Shiji Group and we'll get into the rest of it.

Christine:
Yeah, thanks Josiah. I'm excited to be here today. As you mentioned, I've been in the hospitality tech space for over 21 years. The bulk of it has been primarily in the standalone food and beverage space from the mom and pop restaurants to large national and global chain accounts. And over the past five years, I've shifted to focus primarily on the food and beverage tech in the hotel space alone. So whether my role was a project manager on operations side, or I was in a sales role having the tough conversation centered around challenges, or focused on a product role, all these experiences provided me more and more tools for my tool belt to help me grow into a solutions role. And in my role today at Shiji as the director of solutions engineering team, I'm really grateful for all these experiences and really all the amazing colleagues and clients that helped direct me to my passion, which is also the goal of our team to bridge that gap between technology and the real world challenges of our industry.

Josiah:
Today, you are the Director of Solutions Engineering at Shiji Group. I have had the pleasure of speaking to many of your clients over the years, and one thing that always stands out is how much they appreciate what Shiji invests in solving problems. To your point, I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to your role, what you do day-to-day at Shiji Group, and then let's talk about Shiji Group, what you have as a company, but your role specifically, where do you focus your time?

Christine:
I have a fun role and kind of a unique role because I sit on pre-sales side and then also the product and post-sales side. So when it comes to solutions, you know, you can't solve for anything unless you hear what needs to be solved for, right? So my team also is on the product enablement side and pre-sales. So You know, we need to bring in customers and we need to talk about what the challenges are on property. My team comes in or myself comes in and we run through their tech stack. We run through what they're trying to solve for and really just try and, you know, not push product at them, but just let them come to us with whatever they need to be solved, right?

Josiah:
And Christine, if I could just jump in there, I think this is actually a really important point for our listeners, because it's come up in a lot of conversations I've had with hotel leaders that are starting to recognize that technology providers can be great partners in understanding what's possible. And I'm hearing them tell me and advise all of our listeners in the Hospitality Daily community, you should have these conversations because you learn about yourself, you learn about what's possible. And so when you talk about the pre-sales process, These are conversations with hoteliers, food and beverage leaders who are trying to understand, hey, we have these issues in the business, what is possible? I'm curious for you when you are having the conversations, are there some questions that you keep coming back to that help identify what's going on? And this might be helpful for our listeners to be thinking about.

Christine:
Yeah, we try to get in and get in deep as much as we can. So we talk to every aspect of a business, whatever the technology is going to touch. It could be obviously the food and beverage team, general managers, finance teams, IT teams. And so every section or specific job role, we have countless questions to ask. But what we want to know is, what are you doing today? What's not working? What are you trying to accomplish? We try to help them to frame it in what are the business problems you're trying to solve, right? Not don't tell us what you think you need. That's hard, right? Because they're, they're on their property, they're in the restaurant every day. So they, you know, they think they know what they need to solve. And most of the time, they're, you know, they're like 80% there. But we have to get them to a point to say, Okay, what are you trying to sell for? What I love asking what keeps you up at night when you're driving home? What are you thinking about? What are you still processing that happened today that you're trying to fix, right? And those questions really get them to stop and say, Oh, geez, you know what it is, is that, you know, our finance team is just complaining to me again, they're spending two hours inputting data or scrubbing data and making sure that you know, the right numbers went across and, you know, things like that. The other piece that we do is when we're in the actual property, in the restaurant, food and beverage outlet, we say, take me to the entire guest experience. When I walk in as a customer or before I even walk in, before I get to property, before I arrive, what do I see? What do I know about my food and beverage options or the restaurants or the experiences that you have here? And that's so important because we know in our industry today that that's driving guest behavior, food and beverage options, right? So we ask, before we even get on property, before we, you know, someone walks through the door, what's the experience? What's the experience you want them to have? How do you want to be presented? Or how do you want them to start engaging? And then if I walk to a hostess stand, walk me through that you have somebody that's, you know, opening tables, you got open table, you got seven rooms, you have some sort of table management system. When I see the guests, you know, what is the hostess job when they hand off to the server? What's the server cadence? You know, how are you guys, are you looking at seat positions? Are you looking at autofire? Are you looking at the point of sale managing the aspects of the experience or the throughput of placing orders and those types of things? What type of technology do you want to have in the hands of your servers? You know, going through this entire process, we hear the friction points, right? So we're writing that down. We're listening for those areas where we know the technology can solve, but we need them almost to verbally process the whole thing. And in these conversations, because hospitality people are the best. They, I mean, they give you stories and use cases, and oh, you would never believe this customer and what happened with them. And we hear everything. And so what's fun and unique is that these are easy problems to solve, but every property is different. You know, when people say, well, just give us a quote for what my system should be, right? And we stop and slow them down and say, just walk us through the problems or walk us through, let's just talk, let's have a discovery, we call it. And that gives us the opportunity to hear all those little friction points that this industry is amazing and the people that work in this industry are amazing because they are the grit, right? And the ability to not even realize that in, you know, they're solving problems throughout the day all the time, right? And so it gets to the point they don't even know it's a problem. So we, when we hear it, we'll say, well, do you want it to do that? Or do you want to still handle things that way? And they stop and they're, oh, geez, we just always, because they evolve, they have to quickly adapt. And so a lot of times, they themselves will miss the opportunity to insert technology or to insert some other solution. Or sometimes it's How about this operationally? We have a team of implementation specialists and salespeople and presalespeople that have been in this industry so long that we say, just lean on us. Let us advise you. Let us consult. And that's hard for them, right? Because their whole job is just to hold the entire process and guest experience.

Josiah:
So... Christine, could I just pick up on something that you said? You mentioned every property, every restaurant, every brand is so different. I'm curious, do you hear common themes in the problems that are being faced across the diversity of different concepts? Or is it just end up kind of looking very different in the implementation? Are you seeing common themes and problems out there?

Christine:
Yeah, common themes and problems. And there's a lot of little micro challenges that lead to big challenges. But, you know, we're dealing with such a unique labor force these days with either you know, people not having enough labor or unions that we need to be cognizant of when we're designing technology, which a lot of people don't realize that. So that labor, having labor, not having labor, whatever it is, there's always some component of the employee that we're trying to streamline operations, make more efficient. And it's not a lot of people think, try to eliminate positions. That's not it. It's, you know, there's times that we're gonna help consolidate and help make more efficient. What we find is when we help with efficiencies, people can be redeployed to more guest-focused, guest-enhancement positions. So for example, years ago, this is years ago. when we were trying to get people to adopt servers, having mobile devices, right? And having some sort of engagement with the guests at the table, that way we can keep them in front of the guests, right? And that's so key from a guest satisfaction standpoint. And now that we have this whole other side of our flow where we get reviews instantly, right? We know exactly when we did good and when we did bad, mostly when we did bad, right? that keeping that server in front of the guest is huge because then we can redeploy other people to, you know, quickly run beverages, quickly get their appetizers out, help them another way, do other different types of table touches that without that technology you wouldn't be able to. Well, getting people to adopt a tablet years and years ago was just, I mean, it was like pulling teeth. But now, because everybody has a smartphone in their hand, it's just common. So, and I actually forgot the question that you just asked me.

Josiah:
Well, I was interested in just like these common themes of challenges and opportunities. And I want to come back to that, but I actually would love to share with our listeners just a little bit about Shiji Group. If they are unfamiliar with kind of what you do, or maybe they don't know the latest and greatest, you know, they may have come across some of the work that we've done together writing case studies. The company that I helped build, ReviewPro, is now part of the Shiji Group collection of companies.

Christine:
Oh, no way. You did? Yeah. Okay. I didn't know that.

Josiah:
But I would love to get your kind of overview of Shiji Group and some of the ways that you help hotels and restaurants. And then I want to come back to the technology implementation, but I want to give people enough context here.

Christine:
Yeah, so Shiji is a hospitality first technology company. We're an international group that services the hospitality industry, but we're, you know, we're hospitality first and bring the technologies to all aspects of the industry and all facets of the property. So from pre-stay to the PMS system, food and beverage experience, all the way through to your payments and checkout and post-stay reviews. The whole entire journey, Shiji has technology and products to solve for the guest experience and enhancing the guest experience.

Josiah:
Great. And yeah, end to end, and we'll include links in the show notes so people can learn more about that. But I want to come back to what we were talking about here, kind of how technology evolves and what's going on. And you have a front row seat on what is happening in technology. I would love to spend a few moments talking about kind of big picture in tech, You know, what have you seen unfold over the past year that our guests should know about when it comes to tech? I think sometimes the conversations about tech end up sounding the same because it's all about, you know, driving efficiency. But I'm curious if there's a component or application of tech that really you're interested in and you think holds a lot of potential for our listeners.

Christine:
Yeah, so it may seem basic, but what a lot of technology doesn't do is remove that friction of how you can engage with a food and beverage experience when you're on property. And that sounds really simple. But what we see is that you'll have, you know, point of sale, that's the heart of the food and beverage experience or of a restaurant, right? And then you start layering in different products because you're trying to get the guests to either come down to your restaurant, order from your restaurant in the room, not go necessarily third party. You're trying to keep them on property, right? So the way of doing that has evolved tremendously. I mean, pre-COVID, it feels almost like prehistoric the way it was, right? You're going to call down from your room. before times. Right. And, and it's, it just was normal. And it still is today, you would not believe we just had a meeting with a large brand yesterday and find out that more than half of the properties, they're still doing that. And it's not just them specifically, this is just the industry in general. So what then you have is all these kind of segmented experiences, right, and segmented technologies. So what we're doing, and what is, you know, we feel is best practice is how can we get that whole entire experience united so that wherever the guest is choosing to engage with foodie beverage, ordering food, just room service, or you're out at the pool, how do you take away the traditional, I'm going to sit here and either wait for my server to finally come over to me at the pool, which they'll come over 10 times and ask if you're ready, but then when you are ready, you'll never see them again. It's happened to me. Yeah, they're gone. Yeah. And then the same thing, how do we get them to not call down to an agent and place an order for room service? And it's not to remove the human touch, it's more efficient when you're able to place your order online. So talking about removing friction is, you have these mobile ordering apps that will solve for that, right? In room dining, you can scan a QR code or whatever on your TV and it'll take you through the ordering experience. or you're at the pool like we talked about and you're waiting for a server to come over, but maybe someone integrates the technology to where you can scan a QR code at the pool and order food. That's great. That's what we've seen over the past few years. And people are just, I think they're ready to move on from the QR code, right? And so, What that means to us is that because we have our own mobile ordering application and we have our own POS, uniting that experience. So that's what we are focused on is, okay, so if I place an order with my server, but I can't find them and I'm ready to order more or another round, how do I keep this experience rolling? So giving them the tools, the technology to then drive the experience themselves if they want to, or if they don't, because we see that they either want all technology, no technology, or they wanna just be able to do whatever they want when they're ready for it. So that's that friction that we're trying to remove and make as seamless as possible. And what really hotels need, because you don't want the guests ordering on a mobile ordering application and the server walking over and saying, not knowing that they placed an order. or saying, oh, I can't help you. You placed an order on the app. We don't want that. You're in the industry of hospitality and serving guests, so you should know and own the entire experience to say, oh, I see you placed an order for some beverages. Can I get you started with some appetizers? Oh, I can order that with you, not on the app. Yeah, order with me. And then the guest also has the ability to drive that and say, hey, I know I'm ready for my entrees. I don't see my server. That's fine. I'll place an order. It's that type of seamless movement that not having that creates so much friction, not only for the guests, but then on the back end, when you're, you know, people are trying to reconcile two different systems or they're trying to say, where did that order come from? Oh, it came from mobile app. Oh, geez, we, you know, we got to go over to this system or, oh, it came from point of sale. Okay, go to the kitchen, talk to them. So it's all those little kind of like we talked about those micro friction points that you don't realize, but by smoothing out that entire experience, that's where I see the industry changing is that all these different applications that are siloed, or just people were trying to piece together to solve for COVID challenges, right? And the way that the engaging with a guest had changed. Well, now that we don't have to do that, How do we just engage the guests truly where they are and how they want to engage technology? Not what we want to make them do because it makes it easier if you order online or we don't want to mess with an online ordering system. So we just, you know, we're sticking with servers. We're going to, you know, die on that hill. I think everything moving forward has to be some sort of hybrid solution because everybody's so different with how they want to be treated. You know, if I can walk through and get to my hotel room without talking to one human, score, you know, that's mission accomplished. That's terrible, right? Because I'm in the hospitality industry. But if I sit in a restaurant, and someone isn't coming over and saying hi to me right away, and it's just funny how we all have these different nuances. So what if your technology could handle and help enable your team to serve that guest in every way in every facet of how someone wants to be engaged with?

Josiah:
I appreciate you sharing that, Christine, because I have been working over the past couple months on research on the state of the hotel industry. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? Number one pain point or challenge was financial pressure. So generating revenue, earning profits, right? That probably is not going to shock people, but among all the challenges that You could experience, that was number one. Number one area that hoteliers and hospitality providers were excited by was innovating and guest experience delivery. And I feel like each of those is important. Innovating, you're doing something new. It's not just guest experience as it always has been. So it's improving, doing something new and fresh, and then in the delivery of it. And I think what you just shared brings that to life because if you think about what drives any sort of change, it's kind of what's the pain point you're trying to address, but also what are you excited by and moving towards. And I feel what you've described here presents an area of opportunity for our listeners to practically move towards, right? You described this as kind of frictionless payments, which might sound simple or boring at face value, but you think about the experience that you just described for yourself, for guests at some of your clients, where, okay, this becomes easier. And I actually had the chance to speak with a Shigi Inversys client a little while back. They were bringing to life exactly what you had said, where if you think about a typical guest, they have on their phone all these food delivery apps where it's a click or two away, and they recognize that and say, hey, let's be real with this. We have this hotel that guests could have that situation, but we also have some availability in our kitchen to create meals on demand, right? And you can just click and it has to be a better experience than that one-click food delivery app. Our secret advantage is we have this kitchen downstairs and we could turn around a hot pizza much faster. And so I think it's that sort of like, let's be very real and practical about what are guests' next best option, you know, one-click food delivery, but like, how do we one-up that? And so you have to be, you have to be thinking this way, I feel.

Christine:
You do and then that brings a great point about adoption, right? And so we know that even and this is no, you know, this is just an observation is that we put mobile ordering for in-room dining in some of the, you know, not as tech sophisticated properties. We go back and look and within one week, 17% increase in profit. No additional staff has been added, right? So 17%. CFOs will say, if you give me 1% or you give me a penny on the dollar, that's the ROI. But 17% and that was kind of on the low end. We've seen even higher than that. And then we have some good use cases where people in interim dining immediately switch over to adopting the mobile ordering. And so 50% of orders are coming then from the mobile ordering. And then I know when we go back and look at that, it'll be even higher adoption. To your point, the adoption piece is what we're also trying to help with, because we can put technology in the hands of the guests, or we can put it in the hands of a server. But if people don't adopt it, you know, there's work that goes along with it in this completing this whole workflow is that, you know, you've got to have marketing, you've got to have it, you've got to show how easy it is, because we want to keep the guests spending money on property, guest spend, right? How do we increase that? And the easiest way to do that is through food and beverage. Look, you're preparing for a banquet or some, you know, you're doing meal prep. There's people in the kitchen all day, every day. How can you just leverage that exactly to your point? How can I leverage that to take down those walls of the normal restaurant? take those down and just give access to the kitchen that's already there and they can prep food all hours of the day. All that to say is that the great thing about technology is you have this ability to write like life hack, right? Or tech hack all these experiences to where you're leveraging the labor that's already there. And then you're just adding this component that can help drive revenue, add revenue, and increase the bottom line. And that's what I think is exciting. And we have partners that we are partnering with that do that better. You know, we'll bring them in and they'll advise, we'll tell us about your restaurant hours, tell us about your operations, tell us about, you know, when you have people in the kitchen, when you don't. and advise on, hey, have you ever thought of a ghost kitchen? Have you ever thought of just creating this very unique experience from this time to this time? You're creating demand, you're creating buzz, but guess what? You already have people in there working. You're not spending any more on labor. Maybe you have a few more runners or what have you, but it's just thinking that way in terms of, you know, it's not just restaurant hours are from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and then we come back for lunch, and then maybe we have a dinner. It's just blowing all of that out of the water to make sure that you're keeping that guest there on property and that they're spending dollars with you, to your point, not going to the one-click delivery app, right?

Josiah:
It's such an interesting point. A couple of days ago, I went to a beautiful hotel that was close by me and it had this gorgeous kind of mid-century build that's just stunning. It was a really busy area, but their restaurant was sort of these very tight time windows like you described of, you know, noon to two or whatever. And it was a bit of a food desert around it, but so many kind of buildings and people living there, I feel like they could have had an amazing business, but they weren't thinking very expansively around that. And so I see so much potential. I wonder if we could kind of walk through a story of one of your clients that has done this. You can share the name if you want, or you can keep it kind of anonymous, but what this journey looked like for them to rethink How do we streamline our food and beverage operations? Could be at a hotel or a standalone restaurant. How do you streamline? And then kind of what did they do? What did they implement? How did that go? Because I want our listeners to kind of get a sense of what this has looked like.

Christine:
Yeah, I think one of the biggest successes, and I don't think I can say the name, but one of the biggest successes that we've had, or trend of successes that we've had, maybe we put it in that terms, is that when we have a property that has, you know, it's not just the restaurant. We know the industry has told us, you know, hey, if you put a tablet in the hands of the server, some mobility aspect where they can order and pay, you know, this whole journey with the guest, it helps. But we have specific property that wanted to do that, right? Let's give us some tablets. We can work with any hardware platform. So particularly, there was a solution with iOS, it's called iPort. It's in essence, an all in one device. So I can take orders from the table, but I can also hand over the device for payments or take the card right in front of the guest. So they thought they were just solving for that, the server mobility piece. And then we said, okay, now, the great thing about iPads is it just needs Wi-Fi. You can take it anywhere on property. So what about your banquets? We talked about how banquets, you know, they'll bring in a small third party credit card processor that we all know the name of. They'll bring in square, right, just to be able to get cash bar revenue with their credit cards. But it's such a pain because none of that information is being captured in the point of sale. Other than the amount that maybe was purchased at the cash bar, we don't know who bought what, we don't know the trends, we don't know who bought it, you know, nothing about that type of banquet transaction for a cash bar. And this is, we hear this every day, we got to solve for a cash bar. So, this particular client, we said, all right, why don't we take those devices, take them over to your banquet cash bar and just set them up on the stands. You have an option to also put them on stands and have it as a fixed point of sale. It blew their mind because then they started, we started talking about, well, we do pop-ups. We have these kind of pop-up like taco stands out by the pool. take it over there, right? You know, all these different scenarios of where we're normally either taking cash, or if you don't charge it to your room, we can't, you know, we can't really capture that transaction in one way or another. So the point is, is that we were able to come and solve for what they wanted to solve for. we need server mobility. And everyone says that we got to get tools in the hands of the server. But then we did the, we'll call it POS hack, where we said just because of the flexibility of this device, because of the flexibility of our system, where you can move throughout the property from outlet to outlet without any friction, just take it over to wherever you need it at any time of day. That lounge where everybody's sitting out waiting to check in, you know, at peak times, why don't you put it in the hands of a server and go get some beverages ordered up for everybody? So it's those areas that, you know, that success case of just listening to them, but then taking the technology and say, okay, you want to do this, now let's one up it. Now let's, let's three exit, let's four exit, take it to every single outlet that you have. And that's where it feels good for solving the problems, because we solve what they wanted to solve, but then all these other aspects of the technology and all these other aspects of the guest touch points that where, you know, there's revenue out of a little fireplace where they have, you can rent a fireplace. But when you're sitting out there as a guest, you want a glass of wine, your kids want a s'mores kit, you know, how do we make that seamless and frictionless? And so we suggested, why don't you have somebody walking around, either scan the QR code to order something, or have a server that just goes out there with that iPad and takes orders. I mean, it's just these morsels of revenue that they never tapped into that are changing the game.

Josiah:
Well, I think you mentioned this earlier, but it comes back to this notion of if you want to make more money, if you want to make more profits, you have to make it easy, right? So push for simplicity, make it easy. You also mentioned before around kind of a key thing is to think about adoption. And you've talked about adoption a few different ways for both guests and staff. But I'd love to hear if you have any additional thoughts, because I think this is something I hear over and over again, being a challenge, both for guests and for staff. They have this great tech and it can be sometimes tough to get people to use it. What have you learned to be useful in driving adoption on both fronts? Ooh, such a good question. That's the silver bullet of the industry right there. Part of it's the technology, right? Part of it's the, like, you have to have good technology.

Christine:
It is. It is, you know, any company, any restaurant, any tech company, you know, the key to success is just have a good product, right? Start from the food and beverage staff or from the hotel staffers that, you know, nobody's going to adopt a system that's complicated or that causes more For example, there's this constant discussion about all-inclusives having point of sales, right? Everything's included, what do we need to know? We'll just do inventory on the back, you know, that sort of thing. So how do you get an all-inclusive staff to adopt technology when they didn't have to do it before and there's really no recourse if they don't because the guest isn't missing out on being charged for, you know, food and beverage and that sort of thing. But it comes back to, one, if it's easy for them to see how they can quickly get orders into the kitchen, and get higher guest satisfaction. So, you know, comes full circle where we can get drinks to the bar quicker, we can get those drinks to the guests faster, 10 times faster. And then on top of it, if you incentivize them in some way to say, hey, how about, you know, now we accept tips in these all-inclusive restaurants because you're using the technology and our technology allows you just to turn that iPad around, choose a tip, sign off on it, close out, end of day, room charge, or even credit card if they wanted to, but all inclusive, that's not normally the case. So adoption on the team member side is, you know, making it easy, making it simple. And we do we sit with the point and sale champions and say, go through this workflow, touch every single button, Does this enhance your operation? Is it easy for you to use this and make sure that that's the case? And that is really, on that side, the key to the adoption. And there's a component of the property and the food and beverage team that it's also a leadership thing. So, you know, back when we were talking about adopting tablets, and how do we get people to adopt tablets? It's a culture, right? So you have to more or less change your culture to have your staff embrace this technology. Otherwise, it's going to fall flat, right? Same thing on the guest side is that they need to see it needs to be easy for them to use. It's not a big deal. I just scan a QR code. Good bad of COVID is that even my dad could scan a QR code now and order where maybe that never would have happened before, but making it easy, easy entrance into using the technology themselves. And then they see when you get quick guest satisfaction, or you quickly get your food or you have a better experience and you say, Oh, that that really was great. I got my food fast, I can, you know, get on with my day, get to my meetings, you know, get out to the pool with the kids. Those are the things that reward the guests to continue to use the technology and to adopt it, right. But it's, you know, there's a component of marketing, there's a component of how the property is making these tools available to the guests that there's a science kind of behind that, too, that we try to help people with you. Is it on the check in letter? Is it a link in your text message saying, thanks for arriving on property. Here's the link if you want to order, you know, check out our menu or anything from the restaurant. So those little things and little entryways into the technology is important to to get guest adoption as well, making it easy.

Josiah:
This is so important for our listeners to think about as they're evaluating technology solutions. It is the product because product plays a role in adoption, but it's also what are the capabilities of the technology provider to help you think through this, right? And I think that seems to be a theme throughout everything that you've shared, adoption for both team members and guests. It has to work as a baseline, but there needs to be a benefit to the business, yes, but also a personal benefit, you know, on the employee side and on the guest side, it just needs to make their life better somehow, right? And so all these factors converge. It's a simple thing, but it's not necessarily easy. You have to be very thoughtful in this.

Christine:
It is. And so I feel like we've talked a lot about the pre-sales and solving for the guests on the front end, but the other side of my role is that I work with our product team. And so we have these phenomenal product managers on our team that, you know, we're taking this feedback from what we hear from the pre-sale side and what properties are trying to solve for, you know, and they're looking at market trends and they're looking at our technology and gaps or enhancements or whatever it is that we then can immediately take that feedback to the product team and sit and say, okay, let's talk about this workflow. It works 80%, we got to get it to 100% because that will lead to adoption of our product and it will lead to higher team member satisfaction, which results in guest satisfaction and all those things. So that's the other fun side of my job is sitting with the product team and getting to really get creative with how can we, how can we improve the industry? How can we make our product that much better? And the nice thing, the beautiful thing about our products is that, you know, you're future proofing your technology stack, right? The ability to, you know, continually develop or we have, you know, such a rich, robust API focus that, you know, you don't hit that roadblock to say, when we're talking with someone on property, IT, food and beverage, you know, C-suite that says, this is my vision for the company. You're not gonna hit this roadblock to say, oh, we can take you this far, but then if you wanna go any farther, you're stuck. Or in five years when the technology evolves and changes and cloud gets even better, you're stuck. No, that's not the way it works with the technology. And that's what you wanna make sure is that you're partnering with someone that you're future-proofing your solution where you're just constantly adding in or refining and enhancing solutions rather than having to pull out old technology and then put in something new.

Josiah:
I love it. You've shared a lot of actionable advice, Christine, in this conversation. Just to recap some of the things that I heard, I think kind of starting out with, you know, what are the problems you're facing? It needs to be, I think for our listeners, they'll probably know this themselves. It's worth thinking about, think about asking your team member, think about also, what does that guest experience that you want look like? What does that employee experience that you want look like? Because sometimes you may not feel or see an immediate pain point, but when you think through that, things will come up, right? So there's that part of the process. It's so important to find a technology provider, a partner who can help you not only evaluate these situations, but find the right technology and implement technology successfully. And to what you just shared, when you think about future-proofing yourself. So it's not just where technology is now, but is the product configured and integrated in such a way that's going to make sure that you have what you need moving forward? You know, like we've covered a lot in this, I guess, you know, where would you, what would you advise or where would you point our listeners to kind of think through this for themselves, learn more about what you're doing?

Christine:
Yeah, so if you're interested in, you know, really creating that frictionless guest experience, not just in the food and beverage world that we talked about today, but just across your entire property, pre-stay, check-in, you know, the entire guest experience post-stay, you know, we have solutions and teams that consult on all aspects of that. So I encourage everybody to go to shijigroup.com. There's a wealth of information, but you can click there or you can reach out to your regional contact and they'll be able to connect you with the consultants and the people that can help just start enhancing your experience.

Josiah:
Amazing. I'll include links in the show notes where people can learn more. But Christine, I learned a lot in this conversation. Thanks for taking the time to join me and share with all of us, you know, what you've seen, what you're doing and things for all of us to think about as we move into a new year. Thank you, Josiah. It's a pleasure. Appreciate it.