Is your restaurant striving for lighting fast service and high speed turnaround but not willing to compromise the customer experience? Are your staff efficient but sometimes find they’re jumping the gun on bringing the bill? We take a look at how over-eager staff might mean losing out on some last minute profits and how mobile might be the answer to getting your timing just right.
For those who’ve not had the pleasure of working in a busy restaurant: it’s hard. As a waiter, you’re constantly under immense pressure to turn tables faster, upsell but not hard sell, lug a constant stream of things back and forth through an often packed restaurant without maiming anyone, clean up, deal (diplomatically) with difficult customers and their fidgety offspring, remember orders, specials and customers’ dish changes; and do all of this with a smile on your face for long, long shifts.
Given the challenging conditions, waiters could be forgiven for being a little trigger happy with the check. After all, every customer is different. Some like to get in, get fed and get out bestowing their loyalty on reliably quick, efficient restaurants. No dilly-dallying. Some like to take their time, savour their food, digest their meal and chit chat with their dining companions at a leisurely pace. With these customers, you have a window of opportunity to upsell dessert, extra drinks or even something to take home with them. Bringing the check too early my stop them ordering more which means smaller profits for your restaurant. So how long should a waiter wait?
Luckily for them, they don’t have to become experts in body language or mind reading just yet. Restaurants can let mobile do the work. By letting customers order, amend, pay and close their check using their mobile, restaurants can let the chit-chatters chat, the speed eaters get in and out quickly and those who lie somewhere in the middle, enjoy a moderately-paced meal – each at their own leisure.
Mobile order and pay also has the added benefit of being able to upsell to your customers at just the right time throughout the ordering process and can even provide a subtle sales nudge before the customer pays – something your staff might either forget, not bother with, or feel uncomfortable doing.
So if you want to relieve some pressure from your hard-worked staff yet speed up service without compromising care, it’s well worth considering how much additional revenue you could be pulling in by putting payment power in the hands of the customer and letting food ordering apps do at least some of the hard graft.
