Published on January 5th, 2021 | by Bibhuranjan

How Your Restaurant POS Can Help You Weather the Ongoing Pandemic

COVID-19 has brought unprecedented challenges to individuals, families, and businesses alike. Enterprises in the food and beverage sector have been particularly hit hard. Even in the face of the pandemic, entrepreneurs are finding their way back to profitability, using innovation to continue to offer their customers their favorite repasts.

Innovations in the use of point-of-sale (POS) systems, in particular, can help increase the efficiency of your restaurant, satisfy your customers, and even grow your customer base in the face of coronavirus restrictions. Here are some ways this can happen.

Get More People In the Door

Your POS can help you collect data about your customers that can be useful for your marketing efforts. Data collated on customer demographics, their order history, and dining habits can help you anticipate their needs and cater to them before they have to ask.

If your data tells you a customer always orders a chocolate-flavored dessert after their main course, you can have these chocolatey recommendations ready when they’re making their order. This customer will get the idea that they’re getting personalized treatment in your restaurant place; it will enforce their loyalty.

Such a satisfied customer is highly likely to recommend your establishment to their colleagues. In this way, your POS will have helped you boost sales.

Since your POS will help you quickly pick out loyal customers, you can devise reward programs and target them to those dinners which are truly deserving. Well-recognized customers can effortlessly become ambassadors of your brand, helping guide more traffic through your doors.

Fast, Efficient Staffing

Investing in one of the top-rated restaurant POS systems will alleviate the pain of keeping track of employee worksheets or scheduling and shifting management manually. It will help you get accurate statistics of the hours worked for each employee to ensure you’re not overpaying or underpaying them.

Most POS systems available today enable you to synchronize your staff schedule with your payroll management system. This eliminates the need for you to extract working hour calculations from one system and manually feed it into the payroll system.

More importantly, when your POS handles staff scheduling for your operations, you’re always assured of having the optimal number of staff to take the day’s production. With the system assigning more staff to serve during peak hours, you will be less likely to suffer scenarios of angry customers waiting for ages for their orders to be taken.

Knowing the whereabouts of your staff has become more crucial in these COVID-19 times. In the unfortunate event that one of your employees gets infected, information on their work hours can be of great help in contact tracing.

Touchless In-House and Beyond

With the right POS, you can provide a touchless, in-restaurant dining experience to your diners. Customers can be reassured that the chances of coronavirus transmission are low in your establishment. Instead of receiving a printed menu from your server, dinners can scan a QR code posted on a wall or table to see what meal options are available.

A cloud-based POS system, as the one RSS offers, will not only let your customers view the menu from their mobile devices; it will allow them to go ahead and place their orders online. Contactless ordering will add to the comfort of dinners and your staff, ensuring both are safe. It will also significantly improve processing orders’ efficiency, reducing the time your famished customers have to wait for their meal to arrive.

Patrons will be less likely to experience mistakes in processing their orders if their selections are transmitted straight to the kitchen. And since they don’t have to worry about taking orders, your servers can occupy themselves with making customers more comfortable and selling add-ons.

Advanced POS systems even relieve servers of the need for processing payments and issuing receipts. Once they’re satisfied, guests can make payments directly from their phones.

Thriving in the storm

POS systems have redefined the in-restaurant dining experience, making it safer for your customers and staff. They have also made service much more efficient while opening up new avenues for restaurants to increase their revenue.

This is thanks to the greater customer satisfaction and the accompanying brand loyalty these systems can help you achieve. Your POS can also help you increase your off-premises sales by allowing customers who wish to order remotely to do so.

Tags: data collection, POS, Restaurant POS, sales

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.