Owning a restaurant is a never ending battle. In order to keep things running smoothly, you need to juggle what feels like hundreds of different tasks and responsibilities that change from day to day, all while keeping customers and employees happy as you try to turn a profit. Between managing staff, coordinating with suppliers, ensuring orders make it to the kitchen correctly, and everything else you do, it can be hard to stay on top of everything.
At times, it can feel like there’s too much on your plate. But you’re not alone. With so much to manage, busy restaurateurs are turning to technology to take back control. With the right restaurant point of sale system, they’re able to streamline processes and speed up day-to-day tasks so that they can focus on running – and growing – their business.
In this post, we’ll show you 3 ways in which the right POS system can help increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, and provide insights that can boost your bottom line. Let’s get started.
1. Increase sales
Whether your location specializes in comfort food, fusion cuisine, or artisanal sourdough, food & drink sales are your bread and butter, so to speak. Regular customers and walkins are a great source of revenue, but if you want to get more orders out of the kitchen, you need to put in work to generate demand.
While creating daily specials, offering add-ons, and hosting happy hours are a solid start, they’re only scratching the surface. If you really want to increase sales, you need to dig deeper. And the best way to do that, is to use a restaurant point of sale system. Here are just a few of the many reasons how it can help:
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Menu optimization. Some menu items sell better than others. Some have higher profit margins. When you’re managing sales manually, it’s hard to tell which menu options you should keep, and which you should get rid of. With a point of sale system, you’ll be able to track sales and analyze reports to understand how to best optimize your menu to increase sales and profit.
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Gift and loyalty programs. Your customers love your restaurant, and if you serve good food, there’s a good chance their friends, family, and colleagues would, too. By giving customers the ability to purchase gift cards, you encourage repeat business and increase your customer base.
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Upselling. Upselling is one of the oldest techniques in the book when it comes to sales. But with a point of sale system, it’s even better. Fueled by all of your sales data, your POS can tell servers which items to upsell and when. And with a mobile POS system, they can even do it while entering orders at the table.
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Multiple revenue streams. The pandemic brought some sweeping changes to the restaurant industry, and customers are now enjoying their favorite restaurants in new ways. With a point of sale system, you can set up online ordering to offer curbside pickup or delivery, use a customer-facing display to sell take-home meal kits, run a ghost kitchen, and more – the possibilities are endless.
2. Improve customer satisfaction
When customers eat out, they want the convenience and hospitality that comes with the restaurant experience. If you want to keep guests coming back, attract new ones, and increase sales, you need to make sure their needs are being met from the moment they walk in the door to the second they leave. You can do this by ensuring your ordering experience is as straightforward as possible, streamlining your payment process, and aligning your front and back of house. Here’s what a point of sale system can do to help:
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Mobile POS. Some point of sale systems offer a mobile POS component that allows you to accept orders and process payments right at the table. This can help you reduce order errors, increase transparency throughout ordering, and streamline your payment process.
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Online ordering. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more and more customers are choosing to enjoy their favorite restaurants at home. A point of sale system with an online ordering system can give you the ability to accept, process, and prepare online orders for both pick up and delivery.
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Faster speed of service. If you don’t have a point of sale system, or your existing one is slow, it can take a while to enter, process, cook, and expedite orders. And for customers, nothing is worse than slow service and cold food. With a fast point of sale system like RPOWER, your FOH staff can quickly input orders, transmit to the kitchen, and get notified when food is ready for pickup. When your front and back of house teams can communicate effectively, you can increase your speed of service and keep customers coming back for more.
3. Leverage data-driven insights
Your day-to-day restaurant operations generate mountains of data. Between sales, profit margins, order volume, and hundreds of other metrics, all of that data is nearly impossible to sort through on your own. But this information is important, as it can help you make informed decisions about your business and tweak your operation to reduce costs and increase sales. A point of sale system collects and processes data whenever it is used to process a transaction. That data falls into four categories: sales, product, customer, and staff. Here are just a few ways a restaurant point of sale system can help you harness the power of that data:
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Restaurant analytics. A restaurant point of sale system can collect and store all of the data generated by your restaurant operation. With restaurant analytics, you can take a deep dive into the data behind sales, labor, costs, and more, to gain actionable insights that help you improve and streamline your restaurant operation.
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Weekly reporting. If you want to get the most out of your data, you need to check often and adjust accordingly. With a restaurant point of sale system, you can set up automatic weekly reports that tell you everything you need to know about the previous week’s performance.
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Peak business hours. Chances are, your restaurant is busiest around lunch and dinner time. But do you know which days are the busiest? Or times? With a restaurant point of sale system, you can identify trends in traffic to better understand staffing needs, opening and closing hours, the best times to run specials, and more.
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Marketing. When guests pay for their meals, your point of sale system can collect contact information, or even demographic information if you have the right integrations. This data can be used to expand your contact lists and tailor your marketing to the interests of your audience.
Whether you need to replace your current POS system or you are investing in technology for the first time, the first step to finding the right POS is to evaluate your needs. We’ve created this free buyer’s guide to help you determine which solutions are best for your operation and how you can leverage a restaurant POS to grow your business.