It’s kind of a cliché, these days, to say that technology is everywhere. But that doesn’t make it any less true. And the restaurant business has seen just as much of a rise in tech as any other market — and the benefits are easily demonstrated.
It’s true, the basic concept of a restaurant — a customer orders food and the staff makes and delivers it — isn’t easy to revolutionize, primarily because it is so simple and efficient to begin with. But, as all operators know, there’s a lot more that goes into running a restaurant than just taking in orders and creating tasty dishes. And technology furnishes a great tool kit for every restaurant entrepreneur to hit some of those pain points.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits to the integration of technology, and see why it’s a smart choice for those in the food preparation industry.
Maximize Efficiency with a Digitized Point of Sale
We’ve come a long way from the old-fashioned cash register. These days, a digitized POS offers a lot more than just ringing up a sale and helping to make change.
Many digital points of sales are equipped to provide labor reports, which can in turn maximize the efficiency of your scheduling and how the POS is used.
These labor reports include data on shift length, how many staff members are working and who, and how much they are bringing in, both in charges and in tips. This helps in a number of different ways.
Identifies when you are overstaffed. By keeping track of how much money is brought in hour by hour, compared to your outgo on staff members, it can assist you to schedule less staff in lighter times and days of the week.
Tracks mistakes & need for further training. The labor report will catch deleted items from the bills of customers. If there are more than an average number for any particular worker, they may need extra training on ordering.
Pinpoint your best workers. Because it includes the above-mentioned information, tracking bills, tips, and deleted items, as well as including data on how many customers each staffer is able to help throughout their shift, this data is key in assisting you to properly evaluate each member of your staff. This is great background information for rewarding your best employees, as well as enabling you to make wise decisions if it becomes time to let some of them go.
Technology Reduces Labor Costs and Overhead
Everything comes down to the bottom line, financially speaking, and restaurants are more susceptible than most businesses to failure due to lack of cash flow. After all, without the money to put toward supplies and staffing, a restaurant has nothing to offer to their customers.
One of the main benefits of integrating technology into a restaurant setting is the reduction of overhead costs. This includes covering systems such as staff scheduling, reservations, and even inventory and ordering. With more systems being handled by automation, it automatically cuts down on the need for actual people, which can be a huge boost to the budget of a restaurant, as minimum wage moves steadily ever upwards.
Communicate with Guests Via Social Channels
Social media is a hot topic for brands of all kinds, including within the restaurant field. Not only is it smart marketing, which doesn’t require a lot of time and money to use effectively, but it also opens up new ways to communicate with your clients and ensure a great customer experience.
Marketing is a big part of the benefits. We all have our “foodie photographer” friends on Instagram. Restaurants are in a great position to be that “friend” for their customers, providing gorgeous photos of their food.
Social media is also the perfect place to reinforce your restaurant branding. With the help of a professional restaurant logo designer you can achieve your branding goals on social media.
But perhaps one of the greatest benefits of using social media technology for your restaurant is the open line of communication that you gain to your customers and to your community. Regularly posting content and responding to questions, compliments, and even complaints in a personable and respectful way leads to more engagement from your valued customers, as well as higher levels of social proof.
This, in turn, leads to more engagement from new customers, and so on.
Be Available to Customers Using Dedicated Mobile Apps
Most restaurants have already incorporated online ordering, making it easy for customers to send in their order without needing to make a call — which also helps to cut down on how many staff you need at any given time. But more and more restaurants are taking it one step further and creating dedicated mobile apps specifically for ordering.
Apps of all kinds are obviously hugely popular with smartphone users — there are more than a hundred billion apps available for download, and the average mobile user employs about 40 apps each month.
From the perspective of the customer, restaurant apps have the obvious benefit of making their ordering experience faster, easier, and increasing accuracy. It also offers a variety of ways to pay for their order that don’t involve cash, and since statistics indicate that up to 40% of consumers age 18-34 prefer to pay with their smartphone, that’s a wise choice in itself.
From the restaurant owner’s perspective, however, there are even more benefits to introducing this technology:
Reach more mobile customers, as apps are generally created to be more responsive and easier to use for smartphones than official websites.
Retain customers by proving the efficiency and use of the app.
Including an app makes your restaurant more easily discovered by new customers.
An ordering app offers another place to garner social proof and positive feedback.
Only about 16% of restaurants have their own dedicated app, which means the competition is quite low.
All in all, the technology behind creating a restaurant ordering app tends to be relatively simple, which means that this is a smart decision that doesn’t usually require a large outlay of capital.
Using technology in a restaurant setting doesn’t have to be just a matter of allowing for at-the-table ordering or including a menu on your website. When you let the tech work for you, you’ll see the benefits across the board.
