The restaurant business is one of the busiest work floors of the global industries.
There is so much that goes into making a restaurant successful. From quality food, timely delivery, customer service, billing, and more. Naturally, there are many chances to go wrong.
If you have felt dizzy on days because of the sheer amount of work, you are not alone. The complete restaurant community suffers from it which makes optimization of the operations even more critical.
Point of sale is one of the best ways to do so.
An efficient point of sale can not only improve your overall customer experience but declutter your workspace for more productive work. The best part? More than often you can treat it like your automated sales machine.
Still unsure how?
In this blog post, we give you three core ways in which point of sale brings growth to your restaurant in 2021.
Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Restaurant Sales With Point Of Sale
To understand the ways how a restaurant POS system adds value to your restaurant business, you would have to take a step back. Look into the ‘what’, the direct benefits that the process yields for your business.
Although there are multi-level benefits, at the core there are three primary merits of the process.
In the following section, we take a deeper look at each of them.
1. Improves Revenue With An Automated Process
A POS system can achieve many things for your restaurant business, revenue is one of the most critical. But to understand how, you would have to look deeper.
Looking into its impact on service quality can give you the best insight here.
The main purpose of this technology is to deliver a smooth way for customers to order and pay. Supplementing the traditional manual process with the automated POS creates a superior customer experience at scale. Not only do you create a hassle-free payment mode but have a better understanding of your customer’s preferences and choices on the basis of purchase history. You can use this information for improving their experience and thus retain them for longer periods.
For instance, if you find that your most profitable day is Mondays, you can custom create offers like happy hours for specific days. You can also use this insight to see how you can improve your service and enhance your overall experience. But that is not all.
A POS system is a huge time saver. Think of a situation where your restaurant operates on a counter-service model. Having a POS system integrated here can ensure to tackle the crowd better without tampering with their experience. Your serving team can easily take orders and assign them to tables without running back and forth from the kitchen to waiting tables for reporting orders. This decreases the waiting time for your guests while reducing your work.
What follows is a significant reduction in transaction time and involvement. The best part? You can save a significant amount on your restaurant workforce.
But if you still are having second thoughts, here is a small testament to its power in action.
According to a recent survey, a whopping 95% of survey-takers (restaurant owners) revealed to have benefitted from deploying POS systems in terms of quality, productivity, and customer experience.
To sum it up, here are the ways that your POS can help improve the quality of service at your restaurant and hence improve your net revenue
- Increase Order Accuracy The POS system can help ensure that orders are correct, accurate, and complete. This means your customers can have complete confidence in the quality of their food and beverage orders.
- Improve Customer Service The POS system can help to ensure that your customers have a superlative experience. It can also help you to provide the best quality service possible.
- Improve Cash Flow The POS system can help you to grow and manage sales on the basis of your value-added service.
- Improve Revenue The POS system can help you to capture more revenue by optimizing your production and running costs without tampering with the customer experience.
2. Simplifies Transactions With An Integrated System
While your restaurant POS system is helping to increase the quality of service, it simplifies your transaction methods with simple yet secured processes. You can use the POS as a payment system to collect money. Right from handling payments, to arranging checks and coupons usage, all tasks are a matter of breeze. But here is the thing.
All POS systems are not created equal. You should carefully consider the functionality you would like in your POS for your day-to-day operations.
An efficient POS system must be able to process multiple forms of transactions. No matter what it is, credit or debit cards, cash, coupons or discounts, gift cards, vouchers, flexibility is critical.
Yet another prominent feature is the unique capability to split checks fast and easily. After all, this is one task where restaurant owners can save a significant percentage of operational costs. Getting more from employing less is the goal here.
To sum it up, here are the ways that your POS simplifies your payment process.
- Reduce Staff Costs — Your POS system can help you to cut down on staff costs. This is because you can automate much of the process. Your employees don’t need to do the same things over and over again. They can spend more time helping customers and less time processing payments.
- Reduce Errors — Dealing in bulk billing and transactions manually are often prone to errors. But you cannot afford to lose your customer’s trust. Do you? Your POS system can keep your billings and transactions error-proof, keeping disputes at bay.
3. Improves Performance With In-Depth Reporting
One of the most critical tasks that the POS system offers to your restaurant is an opportunity to know your customer better. With its capabilities of insight-rich reporting, creating marketing and sales offers that are personalized on the basis of your customer profile is dirt simple.
But in order to do this right, understanding how POS analytics works is critical.
An efficient POS system usually has an integrated admin panel that continually collects data of transactions of your customers in real-time. This data is then analyzed and created into usable insights and reports that your marketing and sales team can put to use to alleviate existing challenges and processes. This means, to make better decisions, you will need to be able to see what’s going on in your restaurant.
You can get both a macro-level and micro-level understanding of your trends. Be it sales, revenue, product choices, or per unit sales, you can drill into a day, week, month, or year analysis. For advanced POS systems, segmenting via location is also possible. If you run a multi-location restaurant chain, this feature can be immensely valuable.
To sum it up, here are the ways that your POS can help you to make finer decisions:
- Track business growth. Understanding the performance trend of your business is critical for improving your restaurant growth. Fortunately, the POS system makes it easy for you. You can use performance reporting to track the various transaction aspects of your restaurant.
- Identifying vulnerabilities. The analytics dashboard is a huge asset when it comes to improving the weak spots of your business. Tracing your funnel leaks can help you optimize sales, customer experience, operation costs, retention, and much more.
- Identify growth levers. Have you ever noticed that your restaurant feels more full during some particular hours of days consistently. Integrating a POS system can give you a more data-backed explanation as to when and what makes that possible.
What follows is you can always use that opportunity to deploy growth levers. There is a high chance you would see a sudden surge in sales and revenue for this.
The best part? You do not need to be a data scientist to comprehend the data. The best software comes with simple, graphical interpretations of the data to make your decision-making even faster and easy.
Final Thoughts
Creating a successful restaurant has and will always be hard work. There is no alternative to it.
That being said, does not imply that you cannot transform your landscape into a smart workspace. Point of sale happens to be one of the best ways to do so.
By now, you already know some of the primary ways it does so. But, here’s the thing.
Your journey to your restaurant transformation is far from over.
Sure, integrating an efficient point of sale will boost your performance but the real job still lies with you.
Without ensuring a steady flow of customers in your restaurant, there is hardly any experience optimizing tool that can yield your benefit. Staying inside the feedback loop, talking to customers at all points is thus critical.
Blending the insights from your customer feedback to optimize your point of sale is where your investment starts to witness the highest returns.
So the real question is when are you planning to optimize your process?
About the Author:
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as an Instructional Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband and parents. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at atreyee.c@gmail.com for any content writing/marketing requirements.
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