Whether you manage a quick-service, fast casual, or luxury restaurant chain, serving customers quickly and efficiently is essential for driving revenue and staying competitive. While managing high volumes of guests across multiple locations can be a challenge, there are a few strategies that can help you simplify operations for your staff and keep customers happy.
1. Send orders straight to the kitchen
If you’re a restaurant owner or manager, you likely know how common it is for restaurant businesses to rely on handwritten tickets to take orders – you may even be using them yourself! While this method may seem cost-effective, it’s likely slowing down your service. Not only do your servers still have to write down every order by hand, but they also have to run it back to the kitchen, too, which can cost them a lot of extra time and leave room for errors or forgotten orders.
Imagine a customer asks for the boneless chicken wings but gets sent the regular chicken wings instead. It may seem like a harmless mistake, but the truth is, mix-ups like this can have a significant impact on a customer’s impression of your business. Now they have to wait even longer for their food, and they’re probably not too pleased about it.
By leveraging technology such as kitchen display systems (KDS), you can streamline the ordering process and expedite food preparation, no matter where the order was placed. A system that can connect your KDS (or kitchen printers, if you still use them), will make it possible for orders to get sent directly from the POS to the correct preparation station, so your kitchen staff can prepare dishes in the order they were received and deliver them to your customers on time. On top of that, your servers won’t have to run back and forth to the kitchen to check whether the food is prepared while also feeling pressure from impatient diners. Instead, they can easily view the status of each order directly at the POS and pick up the next dish as soon as it’s ready.
2. Invest in effective table management
Another easy way to serve more customers in your restaurant is by using technology to help you manage tables more efficiently. Especially if you allow walk-ins, the wait time for a table can get quite long – and last for hours, too, depending on your capacity and the time of day. But having to wait so long just to sit down at a restaurant can deter guests from wanting to dine with you and result in lost sales opportunities.
To make the most of your seating capacity, it’s important to have a table and reservation system in place that allows you to manage all your reservations in a single system. These tools give your hosts and managers the ability to track table availability, estimate wait times, and optimize seating arrangements, so you can effectively turnover more customers, and increase guest satisfaction. No more having to turn guests away at the door, or frantically trying to find a table for four during the lunch rush.
And when you can get a clear overview of your expected guests, plus walk-ins or large groups, you can easily avoid issues that might negatively impact them – or even cause them to go to one of your competitors, like overbooking a time slot, or allocating the wrong number of guests to a table.
3. Introduce self-service technology
You probably know by now that self-service ordering is taking the restaurant industry by storm – but have you implemented this technology in your own business yet? Self-service kiosks, tableside ordering, and QR codes allow guests to place their orders and pay for their meals on their own, without needing to wait for help from a server. This is especially helpful for businesses that are still facing challenges with labor shortages and need more ways to fulfill customer orders without overworking the staff they still have.
By introducing self-ordering options to your restaurant or food service business, you give guests the power to order exactly what they want, how they want it, without the risk of errors that could delay the process, for example if a server mishears their order accidentally. This makes it possible for them to modify ingredients on their own, like ordering coffee with oat milk instead of 2%, or replacing regular cheese with a vegan option, and get all the allergy information they need to avoid potential mishaps. And, because self-service technology makes ordering quick and simple, it’s much easier to serve more customers in a short amount of time, allowing you to speed up service and boost sales.
Want to know more about how to maximize selling opportunities in your restaurant or F&B chain? We can help. Contact us.
