Change is the process of improving your business from where it is to where it should be. Sometimes, that can be a physical change. Often, it is a structural one. In the 2020s, however, it is usually a technological one.
The digital era has brought with it all manner of new tools that improve the way professionals reach, service, and win the loyalty of customers. The trend is toward simpler, more accessible, more efficient solutions that reduce waste and fuss around the dining experience.
One of the most impactful ways to quickly improve your restaurant service is to investigate a QSR point of sale app for use throughout your business.
What is a QSR Point of Sale App?
A QSR point of sale (POS) app is the tip of the iceberg that is a whole-of-restaurant system. It is the device your staff, your customers, and of course, you yourself, use to access all the functions of a digitally-powered restaurant in the 2020s.
In practical terms, it usually comes in the form of a series of iPad interfaces connected to whatever combination of printers, scanners, and payment options you feel will best serve your QSR and the various stations within it.
QSR POS looks different depending on where you fit in the team.
- For your front-of-house staff, the QSR app helps them take customer orders, manage dine-in table positions, split bills, collect tips, communicate with the kitchen, and follow the progress of any bottlenecks and service challenges.
- For those in the kitchen, a QSR POS solution provides comprehensive, easy-to-visualize customer orders and special requests, information on traffic flow, and access to staff rosters, training, and corporate messages.
- For your customers, the QSR app can be a serve-yourself digital menu with touch-screen simplicity, a source of entertainment and dietary information, and a way to track their meal progress.
The biggest advantages of a QSR point of sale app, however, are reserved for the decision-makers that need to understand exactly how revenue is flowing through the business.
Improving Your Business Knowledge with QSR POS
A QSR point of sale app means different things to different professionals because it is a hub of connection between every aspect of the fast-food provision experience.
The information it gathers from service interactions can be combined with the data it takes from live inventory counts and the sales figures from recent weeks to provide a top-level view of how resources move around the system. Even a business as dynamic as QSR—with its peak times, marketing demands, and fluctuating wholesale and market food prices—can be distilled down to its most important components with the right digital approach.
The resulting data reports provide a practical guide to maximizing spend, wherever it occurs.
During a time of great change and frequent fluctuation, that insight can become especially important.
QSR During Change
Waste is the enemy of the fast-food business. A QSR point of sale app can help reduce waste by improving communication and calculation.
If you’re changing things up in-store, a POS solution can help improve the accuracy of messages flying back and forth between front-of-house and the kitchen during a full-speed service. You can design your menu and ordering system to break down orders into easy-to-follow icons that make instructions readable at a glance. Similarly, the language around meal modifications and special requests can be standardized to remove the risk of incorrect orders and wasted food.
Outside service hours, a digital POS solution can introduce automation and computer accounting that better balances supply with demand. By tracking sales over time, you can identify not only times of peak traffic but also the items that shift fastest at those periods. Rather than repeating supplier orders over regular intervals, you can stagger your buy to reflect dynamic demand as well as the profitability of each meal.
To reap these benefits, however, your new system has to be simple enough to be delayed throughout the restaurant.
Keeping Things Simple with a Quality QSR POS Solution
One of the chief reasons behind the success of smartphones and the related personal tech of the past decade is how simple it is to use. Touchscreens, apps that download in seconds, social media that connects us to a world of distractions with just a few taps—and it’s all at our fingertips, available in a matter of seconds.
Digital POS solutions operate on that same keep-it-simple ethos. The in-store terminals are just iPads, with all the ease of use and internet power of the tablet you use to video call Granny from home. Every app you’ll need to access rosters, sales reports, or even to offer a refund on a customer transition is made from the same touchscreen tech.
It’s simple enough that every member of staff can learn it in a single sitting, and you can have your new business systems up and running the same day your provider installs it.
What’s more, you don’t have to be in-store to access all your new business tools.
All the software and databases that make a QSR point of sale app work are stored online so you can access them with any internet-connected device. That means you can work from wherever you get a signal strong enough to make a connection on your phone, laptop, PC, or tablet. You can read sales reports while waiting for a plane, follow live service transactions while supervising the kids at home, or update your purchase order automation while sitting poolside on vacation.
A QSR point of sale system is a 2020s change your business needs to consider—especially because you don’t have to be at work to do something about it.
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