Running a fine dining restaurant smoothly is a big challenge within itself. From taking care of the ambience to taking care of guests at a personalized level, it is a tiresome task to manage a fine dine without the help of technology. The use of a fine dine POS system streamlines operations for your fine dine and makes sure that you get better results in lesser time for the same task.
How To Use A Fine Dine POS To Streamline Restaurant Operations
As a restaurant owner, one would know the hustle that one has to go through for putting everything together for a fine dine restaurant. A fine dining POS system makes their lives easier by keeping all the databases and reports on one screen. Since you need to be certain to give a great first impression, everything from hygiene to food servicing and hospitality counts!
A simple billing and transaction process is accelerated 10 times by using what the technology has to offer. Customers would want to come back to a place with comfort and convenience. Choosing the right POS software will all these features will actually help your fine dining operations and sales.
Improving Your Service
You can use your POS system for not just order-taking and billing purposes, but also for improving your restaurant service.
i) Table Reservation
It is quite an unpleasant situation for a fine dining restaurant to keep its customers waiting to get their tables billed. People coming in a fine dine generally expect great hospitality, ambience, and food altogether.
With the help of a smart POS system, you can ensure a better service for your customers. Integrated with the POS, the Table Reservation feature allows you to forecast the exact time it would take to seat your guests. This results in reduced cancellations due to delays and also helps you provide greater transparency to your customers.
ii) Tablet Ordering
With the evolving trends in the food and beverage industry, customers have become extremely picky about their food. It is only better if they are given the leverage of placing their order on their own through a tablet. This reduces human error to a great margin and enhances customer satisfaction. Orders made are pushed directly into the fine-dine POS, thus reducing the order placing time.
You can also let your servers accept the orders through the Tablet POS, where they can view the entire menu display, and also the best selling and high-profit items, which they can recommend to the customers.
iii) Billing And Transactions
Another important feature to look for in your ideal restaurant management software is an easy platform for billing and transaction. The transactions need to be quick, efficient and integrated on one page.
Split Billing:
Since a fine dining restaurant is mostly visited by a group of friends or family, it is always easier to split bills between customers. What you need to look in your ideal fine dine POS software is the ability to be able to split bills for food and drinks, or by the dishes each ordered. There should be enough options for the customers to split their bills, however way they want.
The split bill feature in a restaurant management software enables to keep records for tracking what each customer has had and when. This also adds to your reputation of being convenient enough for the customers. This also tends to increase your customer retention rate, and thereby increase revenue.
iv) CRM Data For Upselling And Improved Service
Let’s look at this the other way around, what would happen in the absence of a POS system at a fine dine restaurant. There would be no platform to integrate customer data on, and hence a number of marketing strategies would not work either. As the accumulated customer data helps to give information about the regular customers, it becomes necessary to run loyalty campaigns.
The loyalty campaigns here would include regular texts and emails to the customers. These email campaigns and SMS’s help to ensure that the regular customers know about each offer that is set out. A good fine dine POS also shows you the sources of these customers.
v) Feedback Management
The next feature that you should be looking for in your restaurant management software is the feedback feature. Through this feature, you will be able to receive feedback from all your customers in one place. Maintaining such a huge database of all the feedback comments and suggestions not only helps you work on what’s missing in your restaurant but also increases your engagement levels with your customers.
Once your customers feel comfortable enough with the restaurant staff, the brand tends to go a long way. Feedback from your customers helps to build a better understanding of what they want. Integrating a technology or fine dine POS system to obtain such feedback makes it easier and all in one place.
vi) Measuring Staff Performance
The food and beverage industry faces a very high attrition rate. This is because the people associated with the industry are constantly looking for recognition and better-earning opportunities. Since there are a lot of job opportunities in this arena, people don’t stick to one job for a longer time.
A good POS software helps to make your staff feel valued and recognized by analyzing their performance on a regular basis. You could start by checking their table turnover time, the discounts they offer, the wait time, their attendance, shift hours, so on and so forth. A restaurant management software helps you take note of all these things individually.
The incorporation of real-time data in your fine dine POS enhances your staff performance analysis to another level. There are multiple incentive structures that you can incorporate within your business model to make sure that your staff feels valued. When your staff doesn’t grow with your brand, they tend to leave for better opportunities. If you work around the same principle, you’ll always take care of your staff.
Improving Your Operations:
Here is how you can use the POS software to improve your restaurant kitchen operations.
i) Kitchen Display Management
Keeping a track of your kitchen operations is one of the most vital parts of improving your operations. Since the order ticks into the time it’s delivered to the table, every step should be crystal clear and optimized. A restaurant management software helps you achieve that and much more.
Kitchen Display Management System or KDS of a restaurant management software helps to showcase each order on a priority basis on a screen in the kitchen. This helps the chef to optimize the time in which a particular dish has to be prepared. In fact, you could also preset the time required to prepare a dish and make your staff work around it. This makes you take more orders in a limited time, and hence increase your sales directly.
A chaotic kitchen could be a nightmare. Your restaurant management software could also help you set up your kitchen equipment. For instance, you can decide if your hot cooking equipment stays on the left side of the kitchen and the ones to make cold dishes stays on the other. You could play around it and set your kitchen easily with the help of your software, as it shows you the kitchen setting beforehand.
ii) Reporting Module
Keeping a track of all your sales and profits makes it easier for you to analyze your growth curve over the years. Since setting up a restaurant involves a huge investment of money, it is essential that the break-even point is achieved sooner. The earlier you understand your sales and their sources, the better it will be for your business.
A fine dining restaurant is therefore incomplete without a proper fine dine POS system. The incorporation of a restaurant management software eases the tracking down of sales and transactions of a particular restaurant. Also, by predicting the changes in the cost of raw material, it also prepares the restaurant for all kinds of emergencies.
‘One of the most evident problem that restaurant owners have is the lack of back-end record. With Posist software, tracking has become very easy. It has also established a sense of awareness among restaurant owners to handover the bills to every customer who comes to dine.”, added Bhanu Nehra, Mia Bella.
Live reporting of staff and operations is also another feature you should be looking for while investing in a fine dine POS software. Since you can’t be present at your restaurant 24*7, the live tracking helps you see where exactly is the lag happening, if any.
iii) Recipe Management For Reduced Costs
One of the major challenges in the restaurant industry is to fight off the forever rising prices of raw material. There is high uncertainty in the prices of food and needs to be estimated. The incorporation of a restaurant management software helps to estimate food costs and standardize your recipe.
Standardizing your recipe would mean that a set quantity of ingredients would be present in a particular dish. This would eventually reduce costs as there are minimal wastage. A fine dining restaurant generally has multiple outlets, which would mean that there must be an integrative system to collaborate these outlets together.
iv) Menu Item Performance
As a restaurant owner, you need to be certain of what needs to be there on your menu, and what makes you the maximum profits. After the successful fabrication of your menu, you must analyze which items perform the best. The involvement of technology into your restaurant enables you to keep track of the frequency of a particular dish being sold.
Your software helps you understand your bestseller dishes at your restaurant. These dishes could be lifted right at the top of your menu so that people know about your specialities. Most people coming into a fine dining love to have suggestions from the staff at your restaurant. Your fine dine POS software makes this easier by letting you know what sells the most.
All in all, a restaurant management software helps to streamline fine dine operations marginally. This brings more convenience both for the staff and for the customers. What you need to focus on is choosing the right fine dine POS, with the required features, therefore helps you grow at a phenomenal rate.
Very insightful.
Very insightful.