Why A Specialized Restaurant POS System for Your Restaurant Is Always the Right Choice
To stay ahead of your competitors, it is essential to have a nice ambience and offer great experience to customers in your restaurant. Other factors to consider is quality service, cleanliness, hygiene, food quality, lighting, décor choices, choice of music played, etc. But all this means nothing if you don’t have a restaurant POS system, an important sales and operations tool.
If you don’t have restaurant POS, you will lose on upsell opportunities, customer service and overall revenue. Often, when purchasing a new POS for a restaurant, one of the common mistakes restaurant owners make is buying a retail POS system for restaurants designed for retailers instead of opting for a restaurant-based POS system. Let us gain an understanding about this system in detail.
What are Restaurant POS Systems?
These POS systems allow restaurant owners to effectively manage inventory tracking, kitchen order tracking and ease the restaurant billing process. An effective POS system helps in effective planning, measures food cost, reduces wastage, pilferage and enhances customer engagement.
Retail POS Systems vs. Restaurant POS System
Even though Retail POS is a great tool to use, but it is ideal for retail store owners. If you own a restaurant, you should use restaurant POS systems. Retail POS systems have basic features, but your restaurant needs more than it.
How Restaurant POS systems are reliable than retail POS systems?
- Table Management: A retail POS system will not offer table management, whereas if you own a restaurant, you will require a restaurant POS system for table management.
- Online Order: With the retail point of sale systems, you will have to pay a portion of every order to third-party online ordering sites. Why share your profits when you can use restaurant-based POS systems that can easily integrate right into your system.
- Analytics: What sold the best today? Which server made the most tips? Only a restaurant- based POS system can answer all the related questions that a restaurant owner wants to know.
- Customer Database: Who are your regular customers? Which food do they love the most? With the help of a restaurant POS system, you can keep track of your valuable clients with an integrated loyalty program and database that reflects customer purchase trends.
- Relevant Add-on Integrations: From managing inventory, employee scheduling, gift cards, sales, loyalty points or customer database everything can be managed from just one restaurant POS system. The same can’t be handled by retail POS systems.
What difference can restaurant owners observe with restaurant POS Systems?
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Improve Customer Relationship
With the help of a POS solution, you can deliver customer satisfaction, thereby enhancing customer experience. With restaurant-based POS Systems, you can change food menus as per season, weekends or regular days, occasions, events, etc. Besides this, you can also reduce waiting time and offer multiple payment options for customers. POS systems lead to quick, better and improved service, which leads to great customer satisfaction.
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Reduce Waiting Time
There are different counters for food items like appetizers, desserts, salads, main course, etc. Customers might order for a variety of food items from separate places. This type of instance demands proper synchronization; as it might confuse waiters and lead to serving wrong orders. With a restaurant POS system, you can integrate multiple servers in a single line. It further helps in allowing fast order processing, improves table management and on-time food delivery. This reduces waiting time and enables restaurants to increase the efficiency of operations, customer satisfaction and serve more customers.
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Enhances Kitchen Efficiency
The journey from the customer to the kitchen can be reduced with a restaurant-based POS system. When you use a cloud-based POS system, the waiter can send customer orders directly to the kitchen without wasting time. The to and fro can be reduced to a great extent, which makes customer service the main focus point of the server.
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Manage Recipes & Inventory
In your restaurant POS system, you can map your ingredients to recipes. It reduces wastage & pilferage and helps in accurate inventory management, especially during multiple deliveries. With a restaurant POS system, you can efficiently manage stock and provide accurate and updated snapshots of available items.
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Automated Menu Display
Menu forms an important part of any restaurant. Before ordering food online about 75% of customers check menu details. When you visit any restaurant, you are handed a food menu as soon as you arrive at a table, isn’t it? It can get sorted with the help of a POS system. You can create a visual menu display for your customers. Customers can quickly view the menu, so this will save both customers and staff time.
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Accept Online Orders & Track Orders 24 x 7
By using a restaurant-based POS system, you can serve customers anywhere be it restaurant, office or home. It has become a common trend among foodies to order food online and relish it in their comfort zone. You can integrate your restaurant POS system with multiple online ordering channels to track orders 24×7. In this way, you can capture customer’s data and update the same with the CRM database. It might happen that customers may have queries regarding your restaurant or food quality, so you can answer questions using this software. It leads to customer satisfaction and helps to create a positive impression on their minds.
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Table Management & Reservation
With a restaurant POS system, you can manage table orders and the reservation process. Customers can place orders via a mobile phone or tablet. You can track booking information by making use of this feature in an accurate manner. It also gives owners an idea about how many tables are empty. This is the most vital feature to know to achieve profit and grow your sales.
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Labor Management
As per stats, about 75% of restaurant owners need management feature to manage their labors effectively. With the help of a POS system, they can easily track labor’s activity, attendance and work hours. It helps owners to understand how their staff has utilized their time and help in assessment of paying salary, further recruitment or dismissal. Lastly, this system allows your staff to maintain their timing properly.
Over to You
To carry out routine transactions, a retail POS system is suitable. But when it comes to managing a restaurant, nothing can beat the efficiency and relevancy of the best POS system for restaurant. Restaurant point-of-sale systems are designed for betterment of restaurant industry. Thus, these systems allow restaurant owners access useful insights and enhance operations in a way that helps them do better business.