How to Reduce Restaurant Wait Times
In a hospitality environment, restaurant wait times are always a top concern for restaurant operators and customers alike. Long wait times can cause customer satisfaction to take a nose dive, and it doesn’t take an hour-long wait to do that. Even moderate wait times can cause customers to second-guess whether they made the right decision by choosing your restaurant.
Here’s how to reduce your restaurant wait times and increase customer satisfaction:
Line-Busting Technology
Restaurant technology has thankfully kept up with the demand for shorter wait times, and there are many options available that can integrate with your POS and help you increase speed of service.
Self-order kiosk technology
Kiosks allow you to take more customer orders at a single time, and transmit them directly to the kitchen via integration with your POS. You can reallocate labor to help with food prep, and achieve greater order accuracy, which means you won’t have to re-make incorrect orders.
Tablet technology
Equip servers with tablets and allow them to bust lines on the floor or in the drive-thru. You can also use these to offer tableside ordering at your restaurant and streamline the ordering process, while allowing customers to pay at the table as soon as they are finished.
View our free e-book: How to Calculate Your Restaurant’s ROI from a POS Deployment
Effective Labor Scheduling
Good restaurant management requires planning ahead for your busy and slow times. Data from your POS can give you valuable insight that helps you accurately forecast your labor needs by identifying trends and patterns, and can clue you in on how to allocate labor.
To reduce restaurant wait times, it’s especially important to ensure you have appropriate coverage for your rush periods. When you are understaffed, your employees will have trouble keeping up with demand. This causes customers to wait longer for their items, and diminishes the quality of service they receive.
A Well-Trained Staff
When your staff is trained to work efficiently and effectively, they can handle whatever you throw at them, be it unexpected rushes or disgruntled customers. A well-trained staff knows exactly what to do in any circumstance to solve problems and keep customers happy.
Train staff to know routine processes backwards and forwards, and don’t forget about soft skills like customer service and problem-solving, so they can handle customer complaints with grace and prevent you from losing out on future business should issues arise. A staff that is quick, effective, and service-oriented will ensure your customers return again and again.
Why it Matters
Consumers are busier than ever, and even moderate wait times at table-service restaurants are seen as less desirable, often motivating customers to order carry-out or skip restaurants altogether. When you offer shorter wait times however, customers notice, and you can go from being just another option to a go-to preference very quickly.
There is a lot you can do on your end to shorten wait times by training staff and making sure your operations run smoothly. For what you can’t accomplish via training and effective management, restaurant technology can help. Focus POS offers a wide array of line-busting software solutions and POS technology that streamlines workflow and slashes wait times.
For more information on what our industry-leading solutions can do for your business, contact Focus POS today!
