The New Year is right around the corner. The Christmas season will be busy. Now is the time to make sure you have your plans for next year set and that you are ready to take on new challenges and opportunities. Here are some questions to ask yourself to make sure you are getting the most out of your restaurant’s technology, including restaurant kiosks.
1. Do you have sufficient staffing to make it through the start of the year?
You may be thinking to yourself, but wait, what does my staff have to do with my restaurant technology needs? Many businesses are having difficulty hiring enough capable staff. If you don’t have enough competent staff to wait tables, prepare food, clean tables, and floors, or run orders, you may need to get some of these tasks taken care of in other ways.
Restaurant kiosks are a reliable tool you can use to fill the gaps left by the missing employees on each shift. These tools never take a sick day, always upsell your specials, and excel at the mind-numbing repetitive tasks.
Offering a tabletop, self-serve kiosk to let customers take over the ordering process gives your customers the opportunity to explore your entire menu and see all of the options you offer. These tabletop kiosks will send orders directly to the kitchen, exactly as the customer orders it. This eliminates staff needing to walk to the server’s station to enter the order and back to the kitchen to ensure the order was received. The process is streamlined and lightning fast.
These kiosks can also speed up the process by letting people pay for their meals, rather than waiting for a check. Your servers can then focus their time and energy on making sure your customers have the best experience possible.
2. How will pricing inflation affect your business?
Inflation is not going away in the new year. Last year inflation was officially 8.5%. In 2023 prices in the Consumer Price Indexes “Food-Away-From-Home” category are expected to increase an additional 2% to 4%. Some of your ingredients will go up by much more than that. With the cost of everything increasing, you will need to find creative ways to pinch pennies.
Spending now on a kiosk may seem like the exact opposite of what you may need to do to save money. In the end however, the ROI on a kiosk is above and beyond the amount you would save by making staff cuts.
Market pressures on restaurant owners will make life difficult in 2023, but there is good news as well. Only 4% of consumers have cut back on the frequency with which they eat out. And with inflation as bad as it is 54% of restaurant operators are expecting dining frequency to reach or even outpace pre-lockdown levels.
3. What do your customers want out of a restaurant?
One thing that is sure to not change in the new year is customers’ continuing desire for more and more. Specifically, experts are anticipating that next year customers will want to know what is going into their meals and specific nutritional facts to know that their food is prepared with their dietary needs in mind.
What is the easiest way to display this information? Printing on paper is costly and time-consuming, not to mention the fact that as soon as you get everything printed the information is out of date.
By using a restaurant kiosk, you can show as much or as little information as you wish. Allow your customers to look through menu items, ingredients, and more at their own pace without having a waiter or waitress read off details from a scrap piece of paper or wait patiently while the customer reads the menu. If you source ingredients locally you can tell the whole food story from farm to fork.
This can allow you to reposition your staff in other areas of the restaurant, like running food and clearing tables. Being prepared with kiosks help your staff handle unexpected surges of customers so that your customers won’t feel ignored or unwanted.
Next Steps
We have answered three questions on staffing, inflation, and customers and taken a look at how restaurant kiosks can help build up your business in the new year. Now here are a few questions for you to answer:
- Does your restaurant have the technology in place that you will need to make 2023 the best year yet?
- Do you have the knowledge you need to make the right decisions on implementing a restaurant kiosk?
Critically examining these questions now and investing today in a restaurant kiosk system can be the solution you need to navigate the waters ahead.
