High turnover is inevitable in the restaurant industry. You need warm bodies to take the order, enter said order into the food Point of Sale system, deliver food to the customers and not screw up the check in the process. All hoping the tips they earn keep them around long enough to justify the money spent training them on your menu. Now find a person who smiles, is outgoing and upsells desserts and you have a keeper! As a restaurant owner, you have resolved yourself that not all of your servers can be keepers. What if I told you that just changing how orders are entered into your Point of Sale system will create a domino effect:
- to fewer mistakes
- higher earnings
- smiling servers you want to keep
The answer is as simple as adjusting your hardware to tablets, let me explain.
As it stands right now, a server goes to a table, hand writes the order on a note pad, then goes to a POS (point of sales) computer, enters order then repeats the process again for the next table. Whether you know it or not, this is very time consuming with all that walking. With today’s technology, it is no longer necessary to overwork your servers.
Now give a server a tablet, this is how your process can change:
- They go to a table
- Enter the order directly into the POS tablet
- Go to the next table
- Enter that order directly into the POS tablet as well
Arm Your Servers With a Tablet POS
The server with a POS tablet has done far less walking and has made fewer mistakes entering the order. That’s because the server did not make a mistake in their notes or forgot what was said. The POS tablet also prompted for all modifiers needed so nothing was forgotten and they didn’t have to return to the table.
As a restaurant owner, you never want to give a server more than they can handle. A server in the weeds will forget orders, unintentionally ignore tables and make other costly mistakes that make your restaurant look bad. This is why a server’s sections are generally around 5 tables. But a server with a POS tablet can do more and be just as accurate. As a server’s speed and accuracy increase, the number of tables they can effectively handle should too. So instead of capping a server section to 5 tables, it can now be 7-8 tables. The more tables a server has, the more tips they can make in a night, which is more compelling to a server. The more tables the servers can handle, the fewer servers the restaurant needs. Therefore training cost will decrease, which should sound good to any restaurant owner!
Servers talk, especially about tips. Once word gets out how much more your servers are making you won’t have to tolerate late hungover servers or the occasional no-call no-show. As a restaurant owner with tablets, you can now kick this kind of server to the curb. If not enough servers shape up soon it will be time to hire again. Put the notice out, you will get more resumes then before. Now you can be picky; now you can hire the smiling outgoing servers you always wanted. Now you can make it company policy to upsells appetizers and desserts, turning all of your servers into keepers!
Learn More About Our Tablets
Let our excellent staff show you all of the options we have available on the tablet point of sale systems.
Having problems with your POS hardware or software? We can help. Let one of our expert technicians quickly assess and resolve your issue.
As always, we are here to help. Let us know if you have any questions.
Total Merchant Supply is a POS Dealer based in NC & SC.