by Lisa SMITH, Internal Account Manager, AURES UK
The Christmas season is a hectic time for everyone, and none more so than the many thousands of people who work in the hospitality trade. Up and down the country, pubs, bars and restaurants are gearing up for the festive rush, a glittery, baubled whirlwind of works Christmas parties, nights on the town, friends and families gathering to eat, drink and be merry.
Businesses have plenty to do to prepare for the surge of revellers determined to be as jolly as the season demands. Rotas have to be arranged to make sure staff numbers are at an appropriate level and stock orders placed in good time to make sure there are no fatal droughts midway through a busy night.
Similarly, it is prudent to make sure your equipment and IT, is in good working order ahead of the Christmas rush. The modern bar and restaurant rely in no small part on technology, from software-based order and inventory systems to EPOS and electronic payments. Nothing will disrupt peak festive trade quite like a till system failing or experiencing a go-slow right in the middle of a packed evening a week before Christmas.
Hospitality businesses live and die by the quality of the service they provide as much as the food and drink they serve. If customers face lengthy queues at a bar because creaking EPOS terminals are taking an age to ring through sales, they are likely to decide to try somewhere else and not return. Similarly, if patrons of a restaurant are left waiting an hour or more for their food because an order system is not working properly, they will take a dim view of things no matter how good the food is.
A go-slow is bad enough, but imagine if the entire network went down? According to one study, 98% of businesses calculate that an hour’s worth of system downtime would cost them at least $100,000 in lost earnings. In a well-reported example relating specifically to an EPOS failure, Starbucks was estimated to have lost millions in revenue in a single afternoon when its centralised US and Canadian till system went down, forcing outlets to close.
Protecting a long-term investment
So, what can bars, pubs and restaurants do to mitigate against these risks over the busy festive period?
The best protection for any business is to partner with a reputable EPOS provider with a proven track record in providing high quality maintenance and aftercare services. EPOS is a long-term investment, and only retains its value if it continues to perform at an optimum level as required by the business.
AURES partners with dozens of hospitality IT specialists who combine their own bespoke EPOS platforms with our highly reliable and robust hardware to create high quality, long-lasting packages for their customers. To their knowledge and skill in software provisioning and maintenance, we add our own peerless expertise in POS hardware asset management to help ensure service continuity whatever the demands thrown at the system.
Our SLA guarantees include always-available stock for parts and loan units to ensure rapid replacement turnarounds, real-time performance monitoring and asset tracking, plus a comprehensive preventative maintenance programme.
To read more about how we can help keep your tills at peak performance throughout Christmas and the whole year round, click here.
