By Steve HANRAHAN – Sales Manager – AURES UK
These days, your EPOS system can do just about anything. From processing payments to inventory management to staff rotas to reporting and analytics – your POS is the hub of your business.
But as a restaurant owner, can your EPOS solution improve the experience your customers get? Sure it can! Here are four neat features that will boost efficiency, convenience and choice for all your customers.
Online reservations and orders
From the customer’s perspective, one of the major bottlenecks they face when eating out in a restaurant is having to wait to be seated when they arrive. Yes, they could phone ahead and book a table for a fixed time, but with the possibility that the call will just ring out, many people are reluctant to do this.
Online table reservations make the process much smoother. With real-time table availability right there on their mobile phone, diners are empowered to secure their seat as far in advance, or at as short notice as they like – even if they are walking up the street on the way to you! With the table management software installed on your POS, the whole reservation process can become so smooth that customers walk right in and straight to their table.
You can also take this a step further and connect your POS to an online ordering system, meaning diners not only walk straight to their table, but they don’t then have to wait around for someone to come and take their order.
Kerbside pick-up
Kerbside pickup is an extension of the takeout concept that has taken off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of customers coming into the premises to collect their order, they park up outside and a member of staff runs it to them. All you need to extend the ordinary takeout management system on your POS is a way for customers to let you know when they have arrived – the easiest way is a push notification through an app. Think of it as a drive-thru for restaurants that don’t have a drive-thru lane!
Bill splitting
In these increasingly cashless times, bill splitting has become a major challenge for restaurateurs. Rather than leave it up to the diners to hand over their bills and decide between them who has paid for what, when you have a table full of people waving cards and smartphone wallets at you, it’s on the restaurant to let them all pay their share. Fortunately, software that will calculate any breakdown of the bill required, and then tell the card reader how many payments are needed, is simple to run on your POS and is increasingly available.
Kitchen display system
Finally, surely a must-have for improving service in any modern restaurant is a kitchen display system. This is a feature that connects your POS to a digital display in your kitchen so that when orders are input into the system, they are automatically and immediately visible to the kitchen staff. Kitchen display software will also intelligently queue orders to make sure all the food ordered by a group dining together arrives at the same time, even if different meals take a very different amount of time to prepare.