Not all POS systems are created equal. Even though restaurant point of sale solutions are tailored to the restaurant industry, the one you choose may not have all of the features and functions you need. This is especially important for pizza delivery, which involves a great degree of collaboration and coordination to ensure that customers receive your product on time and up to their standards.
The right pizza delivery POS software will help you improve profits, provide a better customer experience, and increase productivity all around. To achieve this, however, there are some essential features your pizza delivery POS software must include:
1. Flexible Menu and Pricing
When it comes to your menu and pricing, flexibility is imperative. When customers eat out or order in, they want to tailor their order to suit their needs, and expect flexibility for allergies, intolerances, or even just preferences. At the most basic level, your pricing should accurately reflect the easiest modifications, like a half-pepperoni/half specialty pizza.
Additionally, your pizza POS software should have a level of advanced automation. For example, rather than expecting workers to recognize and manually input combo orders and pricing, the best pizza delivery POS software will allow for special combinations and automatically apply unique pricing, saving time and improving customer satisfaction.
2. Caller ID with CRM Integration
Customer data is important. As soon as a customer calls or enters an order, you’ll want to pull up their name, address, and order history to track promotions or discounts related to the customer’s account. The right pizza delivery POS software can pull up this information automatically, helping you cut down on manual inputs and speed up your order input process.
This isn’t just for your benefit, but for your customers’ as well. Having this information adds to the customer experience, which helps you gain a competitive edge. Nobody wants to re-enter the same information every time an order is placed. This function saves time for both you and your customers.
3. Custom Mapping
While many pizza delivery POS software products only allow you to choose your delivery zones by zip code, an ideal solution will give you the ability to customize your delivery map. This advanced delivery functionality helps expedite deliveries and increase efficiency across your pizza delivery operation. The right pizza POS software will even allow you to create custom pricing by zone, allowing you to offer special promotions to customers that live in a specific area, such as a college campus, or within a close radius to your restaurant. With this feature, you can reduce fuel costs as well as wait times, making it a win/win for both your customers and your business.
4. Driver Tracking
In a time where customers demand transparency, having the ability to track where your drivers are is imperative. This function can help you understand if drivers are taking too long, and can help you diagnose bottlenecks in your delivery system so you can keep your operation running smoothly. It also improves your ability to communicate accurate wait times and delivery times to your customers, which promotes a better customer experience.
Most pizza delivery POS software is set up to handle a set volume, but can struggle to keep up when business is booming. It may be easy to assign orders to one driver, but it is much harder to assign orders to multiple drivers going back and forth throughout the day. Look for software that is prepared to handle the complex needs of your pizza delivery operation, and make sure it can handle orders placed for a future designated time or date, taking delivery time into account.
5. Customer Promotions and Rewards
When shopping around for different pizza POS options, make sure to choose pizza delivery POS software that keeps an organized customer database and allows you to easily and efficiently create, manage, and promote targeted offers such as:
Limited time promotions
Coupons
Loyalty programs/rewards
6. Reporting
Beyond allowing customers to place and track online orders, your pizza POS system should also be able track all of your orders in sales and product mix reports. This will help you pinpoint which menu items are driving the most revenue and identify which ones are hindering your bottom line so that you can better optimize your menu.
The right pizza delivery point of sale software should allow you to compare sales of individual items and menu groups across specified timeframes, giving you comprehensive insights by the shift, hour, day, week, month, or year. This capability will enable you to keep an eye on key cost centers and revenue numbers, so you can make smarter, more informed business decisions.
7. Management
Customer satisfaction is paramount, but at the end of the day, your pizza restaurant is a business. From your inventory to staff and everything in between, it’s important to stay on top of your operation to keep costs down and keep customers happy. When choosing a pizza delivery point of sale system, ensure it can help you manage your kitchen, inventory, and labor:
Kitchen management
Inventory management
Labor management
8. Payment processing
Last but certainly not least, your pizza delivery point of sale system needs to have payment processing functionality. Customers want to be able to pay with cash, debit or credit, so it’s essential that you give them options and make it easy for them to complete payment.
Most point of sale systems have payment processing as an integrated feature, or at least have integrations with major payment processing partners. But in any case, be sure to understand what you’re getting into, as some card processing providers advertise lower rates initially, but charge higher rates down the road. If that happens, you could end up paying hundreds or thousands in monthly fees, which translates to less profit for your restaurant.
Conclusion:
The right pizza delivery POS software can help you manage your business more effectively, while also improving productivity, customer satisfaction, and overall profits. Pizza delivery requires greater functionality than most basic restaurant POS systems can provide, so be selective in your choice of pizza POS software and make sure that the solution you choose provides the greatest ROI.
RPOWER POS is a proven solution for pizza delivery point of sale software. Get in touch to find out how other pizza businesses leverage our solution to streamline their operations.