Guest Post: Improving Service with Self-Service Technology

category: Planning your project

sectors: Retail

Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) are known for consistently fast service and quality meals at affordable prices. This makes QSRs ideal for professionals on their lunch breaks, but often, peak hours mean a busy and chaotic atmosphere, and—for patrons and wait staff alike— sometimes nerve-racking. This isn’t the customer experience that restaurant managers and owners want to cultivate.

So, how about improving service with self-service? It’s a simple solution; mount a tablet on tables throughout your restaurant and allow customers to browse through your menu and order at their own pace.

Putting your menu on a tablet simplifies the ordering process. Restaurants like Tossed encourage customers to create their own salads. The tablet displays the menu and prompts customers through all options, getting the salad and toppings exactly how they like it. Next up, you have the possibility to add sides and beverages, which presents restaurants with new and unique upsell opportunities.

Displaying all this information to customers on tablets helps to ensure customers are presented with all the options, as well as eliminating potential errors that may occur while taking the order or preparing the meal in the kitchen.

Data-driven decision-making

Tablet-based POS technology, such as Kounta, gives you unparalleled insights into your business with a simple tap of a button. You will be able to gather data and answer specific questions such as:

- What items on my menu are the most and least popular?

- What items are my customers most likely to add-on to their meal?

- When is my restaurant seeing the most traffic?

- What are the best times for me to be trading?

Identifying trends and spikes in your business means you can make more informed decisions. You can more appropriately allocate staff resources on busier times, determine what makes your team less efficient, and find ways to increase productivity and profitability.

This data can also be used to develop an insightful segmentation strategy that delivers a personalised customer experience. By identifying buying patterns from your guests, you can create a loyalty program tailored specifically to each customer’s preferences. This kind of hyper-personalisation keeps customers coming back, and turns them into advocates for your business.

Whether you’re planning on replacing your current ordering system with tablets, or simply enhancing what you already have, self-service can help improve your customers’ experience and help you improve your business overall.

About Kounta

Kounta is a POS System that works on iPads, Macs, PCs as well as existing traditional POS equipment customers have already invested in. Kounta seamlessly connects with a variety of online and mobile services such as PayPal, Xero, Sassu, Beat the Q and Deputy. It allows customers to access their store on anything, anywhere, anytime while also centralising an unlimited number of stores like franchisees they own or manage. For more information, visit their website: