3 Upgrades Your Restaurant Needs NOW
Innovation is the key to keeping many kinds of businesses afloat, but in the restaurant and hospitality industry––it’s imperative.
In the restaurant industry, rising above the competition goes beyond the food. You could serve the best food on the block, but if your customer experience, or even your staff experience is suffering––your enterprise is basically a ticking time bomb.
If you want your restaurant to rise above and continue to sustain, think about integrating these three upgrades. And don’t, wait: your competition isn’t.
Online Ordering and Delivery
You may think online ordering and delivery could seriously impact your business model and throw your restaurant and kitchen staff for a loop. But these days, there are so many tools available to make the transition easy, painless, and quite lucrative.
Apps like TableUp bring seamless, cost-effective online ordering to their customers. Integrating their solution with your point of sale is easy and allows restaurants to provide online ordering without absorbing or passing along the high costs associated with other similar solutions. Delivery becomes possible and mostly automated with integrations like Deliveroo, which help expand your restaurant’s reach and customer base and grow your bottom line.
Customer Loyalty Program
The most successful and sustainable restaurant and hospitality businesses have a customer loyalty program. Look at the Marriott hotel chain’s recent overhaul and brand refresh–Bonvoy–it’s all about customer loyalty. And you don’t have to be a huge conglomerate to do it. Even your local mom and pop cafe has likely adopted a simple beverage punch-card that keeps customers coming back.
A restaurant without a customer loyalty program is making a big mistake. For example, imagine new restaurant opens and gets flooded with business, everyone wants to try it. Then, in two months ... no one is coming through the door. All those people that tried the restaurant at its opening have already forgotten about it.
Had the restaurant in question opened with a loyalty program in place, they could have easily collected customers’ contact info to incentivize them to come back with deals, special offers, new menu items, events, etc. And if they duffed on the opening with bad food or service, at least they could contact them or sent a survey to know what parts of the business they need to focus on or improve on in order to get repeat business.
Kitchen Display System
One groundbreaking kitchen upgrade that can help with the items above AND so much more, is a Kitchen Display System (or KDS for short). If you want to improve your restaurant’s customer service and internal operations in one fell swoop, KDS is your answer.
A KDS directly connects to your point of sale system, eliminating the hassle and wastage of the old ticket-printing systems, all the while reducing customer wait times and creating streamlined communication from the front of the house to the kitchen staff.
The interconnected system will touch every aspect of your restaurant, from table booking and POS, to order processing, course delivery and facilitating payment––all in one easy-to-use system that instantly communicates orders (and table status) from the wait staff to the back of the house. Menu modifications and even allergies are clearly highlighted and relayed to kitchen staff making it easy for patrons and staff to accurately alert kitchens of food limitations in real-time, resulting in less food sent back to the kitchen and less waste impacting revenue.
And if you do upgrade to online ordering and delivery, a KDS allows your staff to easily split orders on multiple displays.
The Best Kitchen Display System
Epos Now's award-winning Kitchen Display System works on iOS, Android & Windows, sp restaurants have the freedom to choose hardware that is right for them both from a size, cost and functionality perspective. Contact us today for a free demo!
