About

Constellation & Ziff Opera House at The Adrienne Arsht Center

Elior North America and their brand Constellation Culinary Group  who manages concession services at the Ziff Opera House at The Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, believes that nothing brings people together like food—and nothing makes them happier than bringing people together. From their fresh approach to every course to their belief in warm and thoughtful service, this spirit is the first ingredient in everything they do.

Constellation started in 2008 with three employees and a well-known restaurateur. Since then, they have built a portfolio with over 100 locations throughout the East Coast and California.

The Ziff Opera House has 2 large buildings at the Adrienne Arsht Center complex seating 2400 and 2200 people, plus a smaller venue that seats 250 people. Constellation provides concession management and services for all the shows, restaurants, and events in these venues, plus weddings and large private events such as the Arsht Gala.

The Elior NA and Constellation teams vetted a variety of ordering solutions using QR technology. The chosen solution not only needed to seamlessly integrate with Bypass (the POS system of record) but was required to offer a frictionless order and payment workflow that any guest could use without assistance from the staff. The team preferred a browser-based solution that did not require an app to download, logins, or any other barrier to the interaction.

Bypass recommended the Ready solution over other competitors because not only is Ready browser based, Ready offers a beautifully designed and integrated menu that is easy to interact with.

Ready’s guest driven ordering and payment experience required minimal interaction with staff providing a full transactional lifecycle to customers in an elegant, frictionless, fast, and easy to use platform.

 The Constellation and Ready teams were able to overcome some challenges of learning a new system, such as remembering to turn the ordering system off and on again for the next event. They experienced a printer disruption with Bypass, that was quickly solved working with the Bypass and Ready teams to troubleshoot the issue. The Constellation team was able to roll-out the project on time, meeting all the project requirements.

 Results

More than expected

Constellation saw 100% usage of Ready on the Tuesday night Cabaret events and experienced a remarkably high customer satisfaction rate. Customers found the platform easy and user-friendly which led to guests ordering more and tipping higher.

Labour was kept to a minimum with operational benefits such as improved order accuracy and efficiency gains. Servers were not required to take a zone but could run orders out to guests as they came in, doing quality checks with the patrons, and providing a higher level of customer service than a typical transactional model. Back of house operations saw the benefit of increased order accuracy – fewer (than expected) order cancelations and reorders, plus the ability to control the site menu scheduling times, and dynamically pulling items on and off the menu as needed.

Guests were free to order more at will, never needing to leave their seats and risk missing a moment of the show. There was a higher-than-expected ROI on the series since labour costs could be kept lower and guests tended to order more. Constellation’s implementation team is delighted that the Ready team is in constant communication, always checking up on them and flexible to their needs and requests.

Ready's integration was better and had more features than comparable products. We were really impressed with how Order to Table worked and saw a lot of value in the feedback survey but being able to put control of order to the table into the guests' hands was what finally drew us in, and we’ve been loving Ready ever since. We’ll be rolling out Ready to several other locations across the US.

We’re constantly coming up with new uses for Ready and are looking to roll it out at several properties in innovative contexts. Wherever you can map a POS location and have food sent there, you can use Ready.

 Why keep them waiting? Join the future and meet guests' demands for better restaurant experiences.