At the end of the day, restaurants live and die by their food, right? While that may have been the case in years past, atmosphere and service are rapidly becoming just as important. Keeping things fresh is vital to long-term success. According to the National Restaurant Association, 61% of customers prefer the dining experience, and 73% of diners indicate that technology has a positive impact on their overall dining experience. With these numbers in mind, do you know which restaurant experience trends are best for your business?
Know Your Customers
Before you start trying to chase any of these restaurant experience trends, you need to know which ones are right for you. Running a hip, relaxed restaurant? Tablet-based tableside ordering may speed up the kitchen and improve service. Is your eatery more upscale? Having a kitchen display system may smooth out some of the back of house chaos so your diners can focus on their meals. Ultimately, you need to know your customers to inform each and every business decision you make.
Understanding their expectations is an excellent first step when assessing restaurant experience trends. Armed with this information, you will be in a better position to align your own goals with diners’ wishes. This presents you with the opportunity to modernize their dining experience.
Trendy Tech for a Better Restaurant Experience
Consumers rapidly adopt new technology and now expect their favorite dining spots to do the same. To improve your levels of customer service, and ultimately the customer experience, you may need to invest in some new gadgets. While some items, such as kiosks for line busting and mobile ordering may be more geared towards QSRs, these do present some distinct opportunities for full-scale restaurants as well.
Speed, accuracy, and simplicity are the keys to matching technical solutions to customer expectations. A cutting-edge POS solution can deliver these solutions in one convenient system. However, this only works if you fully understand the expectations of your clientele.
For example, if your restaurant is primarily geared towards older diners, you might not want any technical enhancements made to be customer-facing. Conversely, if you have a younger, tech-savvy clientele, the expectation may be for table-side touchscreens or app-based table reservations and pre-ordering.
Tableside payment is becoming more common and has recently been adopted by chain restaurants (Chili’s and Red Robin are examples of this). While this is relatively new POS technology, as your diners experience modern POS solutions offering these advanced features in other restaurants, they will expect you to follow suit. In addition to having more control over their experience, there is added time savings, which benefits both your customers and your staff. Diners can simply pay and leave at the end of a meal, instead of trying to catch the attention of a busy server.
When a tableside system is wired to the kitchen, orders are not only processed and delivered to the table faster, but you will realize a drop in erroneously filled orders, which works to improve inventory controls and greatly reduces leakage. This also serves to increase customer satisfaction, leading to word-of-mouth referrals and positive reviews on dining sites like Yelp and OpenTable. Even though table-side systems and mobile POS systems are still coming into their own, the benefits they offer to the dining experience make them worth considering. These POS trendsetting functionalities also offer to lend you a hand in improving your margins.
More Than Just a POS System
The benefits of cutting-edge POS solutions are seemingly endless and vary depending upon the format (café, family-style, QSR). There are a number of key improvements that provide innovative efficiency gains regardless of restaurant format. Boosting staff and kitchen efficiency, reducing ordering errors and product leakage, and managing inventory are just some of the ways where POS trends are presenting cost-effective solutions to the varying problems restaurants face daily.
While you might solely use your POS system to process orders and take payments, the right system can do so much more. If your POS includes sales reporting and analytics, you can make even more informed decisions about your business. Not every restaurant experience trend will fit every restaurant so before you start throwing everything at the wall, use your data to make smarter choices.
The Benefits of Modern Restaurant Experience Trends
Utilizing restaurant experience trends and leveraging them to your advantage brings some pretty fantastic benefits. Business operations speed up, customers rave about their experience, and your profit margins become thicker. Want to use these restaurant experience trends to their fullest? Partner with an experienced POS provider
Our expertise in helping restauranteurs find effective ways to leverage technology to enhance the dining experience for their customers will be a valuable asset in your pocket. We dive in, learning more about your business, to recommend concise solutions that will help you grow and scale alongside you. With talech at your side, you gain an indispensable partner that will work with you from start to finish in identifying and implementing applicable restaurant trends. Contact us today to sign up for a demo and to learn more about how talech can be your expert POS partner.
