Are you getting the most out of your restaurant ordering technology, or do you see it as just another among the many systems that make your business tick? Learn about four ways to maximize your ordering platform investment so that you’re both increasing your productivity and improving customer satisfaction.
1. Precision Order Routing
Restaurant ordering technology is essential to eliminating some of the bottlenecks that can occur with getting orders to the right place quickly. Instead of funneling all orders through one central place (i.e., the main kitchen), these systems can separate and route orders to the right prep area — to the bar or to the bakery area, for example. They can even direct orders to the precise prep station, so your cooks can start chopping veggies and filleting fish on demand.
2. An All-Important Metric: Speed of Service
Check out just about any restaurant’s Yelp page and you’ll likely see the odd complaint here and there. Beyond quality of food, slow service can derail an otherwise wonderful meal in the eyes of your discerning diners.
Restaurant ordering technology enables you to keep tabs on your speed of service, identify any negative trends, and adjust your operations accordingly. Perhaps you notice that while your average time to expedite an entree is 15 minutes, that climbs to 25 minutes on a bustling Friday night. This could be an indication that you need to beef up staffing during those rush hours or make some changes to how you prep meals to accommodate peak demand. Regardless, with restaurant ordering technology, you have data-driven insights into the areas of your service that are ripe for improvement.
3. Keep It Simple, Servers
Want to know what else can slow down service in any restaurant? Clunky, hard-to-use systems. Modern restaurant ordering technology is designed with intuitive interfaces that are uncluttered and uncomplicated, ensuring that new hires can practically teach themselves how to use the system. This means you save time when onboarding staff and can get them started sooner rather than later.
With easy-to-use restaurant ordering technology, your workers have a powerful tool to accommodate high-volume periods, entering orders with just a few taps and seamlessly updating orders as needed in the event that a customer requests additional menu items or change her mind about a particular dish.
4. Let Them Pay Their Way
In case you haven’t noticed, the days of “cash or check” are long gone, and payment options have exploded in recent years. From cash, check, traditional mag stripe credit cards, gift cards, tap-and-pay near field communication (NFC) – methods such as Android Pay and Apple Pay to chip-embedded EMV credit and debit cards, it can be hard to keep up with the ways your customers want to pay these days.
Fear not: your restaurant ordering technology can accept just about any form of tender your customers prefer, and most systems are flexible enough to add emerging payment forms as the landscape evolves. By accommodating multiple forms of payment, you reduce the risk of turning patrons away simply because you don’t accept their preferred form of payment.
Armed with these tips, you can use your restaurant ordering technology to your advantage to keep operations running efficiently, to increase the productivity of your workers, and to ensure customers receive the service they deserve.
