What are the biggest pain points you’re dealing with as a restaurant owner? Where are you seeing holes in your business model? The most common ones include:
- Staffing: Labor shortages continue to plague an industry that historically already had a high turnover rate.
- Order Errors: If you’re still using an old-school pen-and-paper ticketing system, you’re at increased risk for human errors and inaccurate orders, leading to wasted food and unhappy customers.
- Decrease in Customer Satisfaction: Consumer preferences are ever-shifting, but their expectations remain high, including speed and convenience. You need to meet or exceed those expectations to keep them coming back.
Every restaurant owner eventually faces some, or maybe all, of these headaches. Do you know what to do about them? Are you at a place where you need to start rethinking the strategy behind your restaurant? It might be time to see what upgrading your tech can do.
Specifically, you might want to consider implementing restaurant kiosks. Explore these top three benefits of kiosks in your restaurant and how they can help resolve some of the mission-critical issues you’re starting to have.
Effective Distribution of Labor
Adding restaurant kiosks to your point of sale (POS) solution will enable you to offer self-service. This option puts customers in charge of their ordering and payment processes; therefore, giving them more control and confidence while allowing you to efficiently re-position your staff. Instead of being tied to the counter taking orders and accepting payments, your employees can be reallocated to run orders, prep food, and clear emptied tables. You’ll be increasing throughput, even with a reduced staff.
Plus, when your employees can focus on getting orders prepped and into customers’ hands faster, you’re not only improving operational processes but also reducing customer wait times, thereby increasing their satisfaction.
Better Order Accuracy
Another way to increase customer satisfaction, besides reducing wait times, is providing improved order accuracy. Customers want to receive exactly what they ordered (and paid for). With self-service restaurant kiosks, they know their requests and specifications were entered correctly because they did it themselves.
An order from a restaurant kiosk can go directly to the kitchen, so you don’t have to worry about staff waiting to re-enter an order into a busy, stationary POS terminal or the kitchen staff trying to read a handwritten ticket. Both of those ordering processes allow far too many opportunities for human errors to be introduced. Meals rejected for inaccuracy waste food, time, and customer goodwill. Avoid order issues and long table turn times, and give customers more control, with kiosks.
Larger Ticket Sizes
When you give customers control over their own ordering experience with kiosks, the benefits go beyond increased accuracy. Self-ordering kiosks lead to significantly larger average customer ticket sizes: one burger chain in Florida saw an increase of 18.5% in ticket size, and others have seen even higher profits.
Why is that? For one thing, customers are more comfortable making selections, adding special instructions, and sizing up portions when they are managing the order placement themselves instead of through a server. They don’t have to worry about being judged for the amount of food they choose or the “pickiness” of their customization requests.
Additionally, restaurant kiosks offer more opportunities to upsell and cross-sell consistently. Appealing visuals on the screen can tempt customers into adding more items, and you can advertise specific menu items, special promotional deals or combos, events, and more. Customers don’t feel as pressured to order quickly as they might with a cashier, and can take a few moments to browse your offerings in more depth — and discover more things they want.
Think about the number of tickets your restaurant typically fills in a day. Imagine if you could gain an average of just $1 on each of those tickets, from people adding larger drinks or desserts or extra onions. How quickly would that amount raise your bottom line and let the kiosks pay for themselves?
Can You Afford NOT to Try Kiosks?
The benefits of kiosks in restaurants can help you alleviate many common pain points. You can combat labor shortages by freeing your staff from the ordering process and reallocating them to more useful areas. The elimination of order errors and greater speed of service will meet customer expectations and increase their satisfaction (and encourage repeat business).
Now that you’ve identified the holes in your business, it’s time to turn them around. Implement kiosks to help streamline processes, boost restaurant revenue, and build customer satisfaction. With the right technology, your business can thrive.
