Imagine a tale of two systems: It’s 7:30 in the morning and you have to make an 8:00 am meeting. Your stomach is rumbling and you’re trying to decide between Bob’s Bagels and Jim’s Bakery. Bob’s Bagels has a line out the door and around the corner. On the other hand, Jim’s Bakery just upgraded to a new POS system that helps him bust lines and capture more revenue, even during the busiest rushes of the day. Naturally, if you want to make your morning meeting, it’s looking like a great day to visit Jim’s Bakery. Speed and efficiency are paramount of QSRs and fast casual spots, but what is line busting, exactly? And are you properly equipped to handle it?
Learning How to Use and Leverage Line Busting to Your Advantage
Line busting is pretty self-explanatory: You’re trying to bust a line. Often, this means meeting the customer at the place in line, taking their order, and processing their sale on the spot. It can also mean using a self-ordering system to streamline the order process. It’s especially useful for businesses that have limited counter space and are forced to address customers one-by-one. However, not every POS system is up to this task.
Thankfully, there are solutions available for you to utilize line busting in ways that meet customer expectations. Line busting is quickly becoming the norm for many QSRs, cafes, and fast casual restaurants. During rush hours, most customers aren’t going to be racking up large tabs. They want to get in, grab their meal, and go about their day. That’s why it’s incredibly important to speed up your workflow to maximize revenue during the busiest times.
Leveraging your POS solution is the best way to make line busting work. It all starts with understanding and matching your customer expectations to the line busting options available in a prospective POS system.
Understand the POS Options Needed for Line Busting
In order to fully provide a technical solution to your line busting efforts, you need to start by learning more about available POS options. Selecting the right mix of these products will help determine the flow of your foot traffic, the speed of product delivery, how to establish real-time inventory controls, as well as how fast your transactions are completed.
- Mobility. Tablet-based POS options are a great way to start line busting. Your staff can take orders from the line, tablet in hand. On the sales floor, you gain additional benefits by allowing you and your staff to check inventory or process client purchases right where they stand, saving both your customers and your business valuable time.
- Kiosks and customer-facing displays. Customer facing displays that can serve as kiosks are a great way to facilitate line busting. Your customers can order at a kiosk near the entrance and pick up their order as they move through your business. For added flexibility, this can be a device that is used by staff during slower periods and then placed into kiosk mode for busier times.
- Online/mobile ordering. The ability to place an order while sitting at a stop light and arriving to simply grab your coffee and go is a dream of most commuters. With the right POS solution in place, you can turn their dreams into a reality. Offering your clients app-based ordering and payment options is game-changing and will quickly earn the praise of your customers through a rapid product pick-up. Ordering becomes simplified, and the convenience and accuracy will increase revenues.
- Seamless sync across devices and locations. Adding this to your POS solution presents you with forward-thinking options. You’ll be able to manage orders and transactions across multiple devices in real-time. This increases ordering efficiency and eliminates mistakes. Inventory management becomes a breeze, especially if you are managing multiple locations. Real-time data processing allows you to see stock levels and customer volumes at a glance.
Time savings is the name of the game for both your customers and your business operations. Ultimately, the POS options you implement must be precise and reduce the challenges of handling high volumes of customers in short periods of time.
Collecting the Right Data for Overall Performance
Line busting has one ultimate goal: Find your bottlenecks and eliminate them. The best way to find those bottlenecks? Good, old-fashioned data.
Tracking transactions will give you a quick look into when your peak times are. If you are a QSR or a café, this includes insights into data such as which sandwiches are most popular at lunch on Wednesdays, or how many baristas you need manning your latte machine versus processing orders. Maybe instead of running two registers, you have one employee working through the line and sending orders to the bar while an additional barista handles the higher drink volumes.
This will get you started on the right line busting path. QSRs and fast casual especially struggle with this challenge during peak business hours. Without line busting in place, it’s easy for your employees to get overwhelmed by a particularly stressful lunch rush. Not only can it increase wait times and irritate your customers, but it can also lower employee morale. That’s why you should be using data and management tools to help you understand where you need to reassess your ordering approach.
Learn from the Experts What Line Busting Can do For You
When you are weighing the pros and cons of implementing a POS solution that can aid you in line busting, don’t only think of reducing your lines or freeing up your staff’s time, but also of enhancing the customer experience while gaining a POS system that is easy to use and flexible with options. This is why it’s so important to find the right provider.
As an experienced POS solution provider, talech brings a variety of line busting options that can be easily customized and fit into your business goals. We step back with you to locate areas of improvement, architecting a solution that removes your headaches through automation, an alluring UI and flexible hardware options. We help you to know what data needs to be looked at, helping you to generate reports which tell you what you need to know. Contact us today or sign up for a free demo to get started on the road to maximizing your point of sale benefits.
