Executive Insight Q&A: POS Mobility Enhances the Guest Experience

POS is the heart of a restaurant operation. How can POS mobility and ease of integration enhance efficiency and ROI?

More frequently, restaurant patrons view self-checkout and table-side ordering tablets as a progressive trend that can enhance their experience.  Restaurant managers recognize the technology’s ability to handle more customer volume and increase end-customer satisfaction and sales. 

Leveraging tablets for tableside ordering, servers can select items swiftly through an easy touch interface and automatically update the order to the kitchen display system, cutting the server’s travel times and consolidate their role as “servers.” Feedback from chain restaurant customers have informed us that this has increased server productivity down to a 1 server per 10 tables ratio.  There is also increased tablet use at drive-thru restaurants, with the increased use of pre-order servers with tablets mid-line to alleviate long drive-thru times.

In this new climate of reduced worker headcount in restaurant and hospitality business, there is an increase in applications of table mounted tablets for self-service.  The customers can order at their own pace, without any rush, helping to expedite processes between servers, kitchen, menu or hospitality information, and customers. 
 

How can the right POS enhance customer relationships and personalization?

Right away the addition of POS systems plays an important role to improve their experience.  Customers commonly understand that a self-checkout POS system will speed up their ordering process.  Also, corporate image gets a boost: intelligent PC interfaces for restaurant/hospitality applications give the impression of a progressive business and demonstrate that image by the equipment’s professional look and feel.

Incentives for customer memberships translate to better personalized touches, such as serving a custom menu tailored to their interests, or a specific discount promotion. This personalization helps grow the relationship between business and customer. 

Restaurant operators are open to expanding options for self service. How is technology responding to this new demand?

Their lists of applications of customer facing PCs are expanding as customers now more frequently look for self-service terminals to provide fast and personalized service.  These benefits include kiosks with biometric identification, such as fingerprint recognition, or with other new peripherals, such as payment modules, RFID, and printers, lending to a restaurant operating as fully cashless.  This equates to better customer satisfaction and higher revenues. 

Moreover, Advantech works with software partners to offer advanced kiosk services such as touchless interface.  With touchless integration, customers can scan a QR code on the terminal screen, giving on-phone directions to allow the customer’s phone to double as the interface with the kiosk PC, alleviating infection spread or other customer concerns.

What opportunities are there for technology to better manage restaurant staff, inventory, and operations?

With our POS software partners offering data management solutions for restaurant and hospitality applications, businesses can leverage POS and self-service terminal data uplinked to the cloud for analysis.  Offering a dashboard view, this analysis can provide actionable information to allow restaurants to optimize their supply chain integration, server order accuracy, and make changes to reflect customer preferences.

At a time when the supply chain is impacted, it really helps our customers when we can offer an end-to-end data management vantage point rather than just focus on the interface itself.  This lends to the restaurant being better poised to not only offer an ideal customer experience, but arm them with supply chain intelligence, enable them to monitor inventory, assess pricing, and optimize their business moving forward.